Viewing Donna Huddleston: Company at White Cube Mason’s Yard

The latest in a series of exhibitions Inside the White Cube, organised since 2011 at White Cube to showcase work by artists not represented or previously exhibited by the gallery, is Donna Huddleston: Company. Though she has presented her drawings to the public before – including at the Drawing Room in 2019 – this solo exhibition is the first time Huddleston has ever shown paintings, revealing a suite of new large-scale acrylic works.

Huddleston’s background is in set and costume design, and this becomes apparent in her approach, where drawing characters and their clothing is the beginning of rich and exploratory worlds, creating a sense of play and possibility, stylistically influenced by the technical drawings she used to do at theatre design school, graphic, flat and meticulously constructed fabulations. The scale of the figures Huddleston has made for Company also ventures into new ground; this time she’s worked at life size, so the figures feel present in the room. Though they touch on references taken from film, theatre, literature and classical painting, the characters are difficult to pin down to a time or place, inviting projection and imagination.

They might also be seen as self-portraits of the artist, to an extent. “When you paint figures there’s always an element of yourself in them.” Huddleston has said. “There’s an element of yourself in everything. I do find my face can appear in some pictures. I’m physically feeling the figure as I paint them – their posture, their stance, their composition. So I think naturally I place myself into them.”