Diane Chappalley: What Holds Us

Megan Mulrooney is pleased to present What Holds Us, an exhibition of new paintings and ceramic wall works by Diane Chappalley. The exhibition will be on view from November 15 – December 20, 2025.

The exhibition includes a series of paintings in which figures appear suspended within soft, atmospheric grounds, surrounded by flowers and embodying curving, embryonic forms, a visual language that evokes a state of becoming. Two accompanying ceramic series, one of flowers, the other of hearts, extend these motifs into three dimensions, as though elements from the paintings have blossomed within the room. Together, the works describe an in-between space: intimate, bodily, and devotional.

Chappalley created this body of work over the course of the past two years, between the birth of her two sons. The works therefore mark an extended meditation on maternity and matrescence, capturing a period in which Chappalley’s inner and outer worlds became porous. The title, borrowed from a central painting in the exhibition, refers both to the act of holding – a child, a body, a self – and to the invisible systems of care and renewal that sustain that act.

During pregnancy, the artist describes, the body becomes “a world within a world” – a condition that is at once physical and metaphysical, anchoring her to a cycle of creation that is both ordinary and magical. The paintings stage this doubleness: the strength and fragility of gestation, the feeling of being two and then becoming two.

Chappalley’s brushwork often moves between figuration and atmosphere, tracing forms that seem to emerge from fog, desert, or dream. In Porous Ground, for instance, a landscape dissolves into vaporous hues where the underlying linen is visible, suggesting the inner terrain of feeling as much as the outer one. Circular motifs recur throughout the exhibition – seeds, hearts, suns – invoking cycles of renewal and the knowledge passed through generations of women. The heart, inspired by the structure of a seed, becomes a motif of both vulnerability and rootedness, connecting the corporeal to the mythic. Flowers appear as votive offerings, reminiscent of ex-votos once left in Catholic churches in gratitude for protection. In La Danse, a diptych recalling the composition of an altarpiece, the figures gather in a huddled posture of devotion, not to a deity, but to one another.

Diane Chappalley (Born in 1991, in Switzerland, lives and works in London) studied at the Slade School of Fine Art, University College London, earning her MA as well as City and Guilds of London Art School, earning her BA. Recent exhibitions include Lychee One Gallery, London, UK; Taymour Grahne Projects, London, UK; WOAW Gallery, Hong Kong, CN, Tube Culture Hall, Milan, IT; and Coma Gallery, Sydney, AU, among others. Collections include HSBC art collection, UK; Oxford University collection, UK; CHUV Collection, Lausanne, CH; X Museum, Beijing, CN.