Tallulah Hutson

Tallulah Hutson is a London-born and London-based figurative oil painter whose work is driven by the expressive charge of the body—how a single stance, glance, or movement can contain an entire atmosphere. Her practice began in portraiture and has expanded into depictions of figures in ambiguous states of motion: dancing, surrendering, resisting, transforming. Across these scenes, Hutson is drawn to “deeply evocative, intimate moments that occur amidst the mundane,” whether that’s a fleeting encounter or the sweat-lit release of a dancefloor.

Hutson’s approach is grounded in rigorous training from life. After growing up in London, she travelled to Florence to study drawing and portraiture at Charles H. Cecil Studios, including the sight-size method and an emphasis on observation under natural light. She later returned to London to continue developing her studio practice with The Bomb Factory Art Foundation, where she has been a resident artist since 2021, and undertook an intensive residency in New York City in late 2023.

Her recent work focuses on the release and elation people experience when surrendering to sound, drawing parallels between contemporary encounters with music and older visual traditions of spiritual intensity. By referencing historic religious artworks—once used to depict revelation, ecstasy, and social “importance”—she reclaims that sense of reverie for ordinary lives and contemporary bodies.

That reverie is never simple. Hutson’s dancing figures hover between states: delight and distress, transcendence and collapse. Hellscape hints and sharpened atmospheres reflect a world “constantly in crisis,” asking whether dancing in the face of disaster becomes defiance, escapism, or despair. The colour red is central—evoking club lights and late nights, but also heat, passion, and violence—holding both the seduction and the stakes of the present tense.