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Dido Powell’s practice extends across painting and drawing, working in multiple genres, including still life, domestic interiors, landscape and architecture. Born into an architectural family, her work engages with discrepancies in scale, colour and unexpected perspectives. Powell studied at University of Leeds and spent some years living in Ghana, which has influenced her use of colour to this day. She currently lives and works from her studio in London.
Powell’s interiors celebrate the accidental poetry of domestic spaces in which she explores the pictorial possibilities offered by arrangements of form, colour and line: the way light refracts through stemware; the lustre of a decorative bowl; the trompe l’oeil illusion of an oil cloth pattern; or the movement of a curtain in the summer breeze.
In the tradition established by Seventeenth-Century Flemish and Dutch still life painters, Powell’s still lifes depict an abundance of flowers, fruits and foods; a cornucopia of produce in which she finds equal joy in the imperfect curves of a red pepper and the ripe fullness of a pomegranate.
Beyond the interior and studio, Powell finds inspiration in both the city and landscapes further afield. Recent works are inspired by the play of light on office building fenestrations and locations in and around Nice, where she exploits the light of southern France, as well as discrepancies in scale, colour variation and unexpected perspectives.
Powell’s figure studies and portraits are sensitively and rigorously observed and reveal each subject’s authentic nature with great empathy and skill.
Dido Powell’s work has been included in numerous solo and group exhibitions, including: Visual Variations: Figurative to Abstract, NoonPowell Gallery, Notting Hill, London (2020); Sensibilities of Belonging, NoonPowell at Mall Galleries, London; Chelsea Arts Club, London; The Royal Academy Summer Exhibition, The Royal Academy, London; The Mall Galleries, London; The Contemporary Art Society, London; and Whitechapel Open, Whitechapel Gallery, London. Public commissions include St. Mary’s Hospital, London; Charring Cross Hospital, London; and David Game College, London.