Ginny on Frederick
99 Charterhouse Street
London EC1M 6HR
6 March – 10 April 2026
Hannah Murray’s solo exhibition Charm is currently on view at Ginny on Frederick in London from 6 March to 10 April 2026
About exhibition
A woman sits poised on a plush rose scalloped chair. Heavy crimson velvet curtains line the walls, their folds multiplying in the large mirror that looms behind her. Pastel pink marble sinks carved in a similarly elaborate scalloped rim complete the dressing-room tableau. She is clutching a compact mirror. Her skin is porcelain, carrying a faint, unnatural luminescence. The sequinned yellow top she wears catches the light in crystalline flashes, as the neckline glitters with gemstones in a cool, metallic tone. Her lips, lacquered in orange gloss, curve
with the suggestion of a thought not yet voiced. Long dark hair drapes down her back, and the only jewellery she wears is the rose-quartz diamond cluster hugging her ear like a small satellite.
What catches the eye, however, are her eyes. Her pupils are dilated to a near feral width, and the irises are oversized, strangely buoyant, drifting just beyond the frame, as though perceiving something not available to the viewer. They oscillate between a closed-off vacancy and a hyper-aware gaze. Across Hannah Murray’s paintings, the sitters’ eyes are enlarged. But not in an illusory, cartoonish way. They echo the visual grammar of the contemporary screen: the eyes of anime avatars, TikTok filters, or glossy AI-generated portraits. Across art history, the female gaze has been coded through eyes. In Renaissance and Baroque portraiture, a direct or attentive gaze signalled intelligence, virtue, or social presence, and in 17th-19th century Dutch and Victorian painting, wide eyes often
conveyed youth, or fragility, a visual shorthand for culturally prescribed femininity. Murray inherits this lineage, but recalibrates it. Her meticulously painted eyes hover between historical portraiture and a near algorithmic post-production.
Charms dwell in the uneasy space between self-presentation and self-possession. These are women formed by a culture of polish and performance, yet shadowed by older histories of how the feminine body has been framed. They are composed but not serene, adorned but not decorative, luminous yet opaque. Through them, Murray renders femininity not as critique nor celebration, but as an ongoing negotiation in a world where beauty, control, desire, and anxiety are intimately entwined.
Text courtesy of Ginny on Frederick, London
