Insight 2.0: Liorah Tchiprout

INSIGHT 2.0 is an exhibition series presenting new works by artists in the Pippy Houldsworth Gallery viewing rooms. Reviving the format of the gallery's INSIGHT programme inaugurated online in 2020, each solo presentation is accompanied by a video of the artist in their studio, shedding light on their working practice and inner world. 

For the first edition, London-based artist Liorah TchiprouT Presents unlock a new door, featuring a series of paintings on panel and board, and works on paper, on view both in person and virtually.

In this presentation, Liorah Tchiprout offers a fresh perspective on her signature handmade dolls, depicting them in novel compositions and expanding the narrative of their imaginary world. The title of the exhibition quotes the Rabbi Nachman of Breslov: 'All that new beginnings require is you to unlock a new door'. Tchiprout has spent the past few months creating a coterie of new dolls from which to draw inspiration, grounding herself with a series of ink drawings and smaller paintings as these figures evolve, unlocking a new door.

Tchiprout works across painting, printmaking, and sculpture, creating compositions that are both fantastical and intimate, influenced by Yiddish literature and her Jewish heritage. Central to her practice are hand crafted dolls—modelled after herself, friends, and literary or imagined characters—made with wooden or wire armatures, modelling clay, handmade clothing, and human or animal hair. These dolls serve as a visual shorthand in her paintings, embodying both real and imaginary qualities, their slack physicality creating an emotive presence that blurs the line between fiction and reality. Her painting practice retains the mark-making sensibilities of her earlier monoprints and etchings, as light and shadow interact with the textured surfaces of her dolls much like tactile gestures define her prints, reinforcing a self-referential cycle of observation and world-building.

“Ultimately, Tchiprout is keen to craft another world, one which nods to her childhood experience of observing her own world around her, as an attempt to process an often confusing and terrifying space. These paintings capture this sense of loneliness, and become a refuge in their own right.”

- Hannah Silver for Wallpaper Magazine, 29 December 2024

Tchiprout creates miniature simulacrums of humans, then paints them with the delicacy that other painters ascribe to living subjects. “We are caught,” writes art historian Dr Richard Davey, “pulled in, intrigued, held captive in narratives conveyed by a tilt of the head, a half look away, an expressive arm raised in silent conversation, a demure downward gaze, the silent body language that needs no words.” The dolls’ expressions suggest that they are characters in numerous off-panel stories.” 

 - Joe Lloyd for Studio International, 13 September 2024

Liorah Tchiprout does not make studies from life. Instead, the young London artist constructs exquisite dolls adorned in minuscule jewellery and delicate scraps of fabric, inspired by female protagonists from Yiddish literature, as well as more personal references. They are then set in a realm of tiny furniture and other mini accoutrements, forming tableaux that, when dramatically lit by an array of poseable lamps, result in a theatrical and occasionally eerie chiaroscuro that she uses to inform her final compositions in oil paint and etching.

- Holly black for world of interiors, 15 September 2024