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“What I corrupted was what is called the truth, in favour of a more marvellous world”
Anaïs Nin, A Spy in the House of Love, 1954

Pippy Houldsworth Gallery presents a site-specific installation by London-based artist Liorah Tchiprout in its micro project space, The Box.

In What I corrupted was what is called the truth… the artist stages her miniature paintings within an intimate yet uncanny studio setting, casting her dolls as actors in a scene that is equal parts personal diorama, cabinet of curiosities, and tableau vivant. A space complete with miniature versions of real objects found in her studio - cigarettes, Jane Austen novels, ersatz Tiffany lamp, prepared canvases, and a pot of brushes - the artist plays with shifting scales to create an intimate view of her studio practice.

Presented in public for the first time, Tchiprout’s dolls are central to her practice, the basis of a self-referential realm from which the artist draws her subject matter. Building upon a wooden mannequin base, or covering her own metal wire armatures, Tchiprout’s figures are animated through modelling clay, human or animal hair, and handmade clothing. These dolls form the basis of her painterly compositions, groups of figures that bow their weighty heads, emotive in their slack physicality.

As Tchiprout paints the dolls they mediate her experience of painting from life. Modelled after Tchiprout herself, or close family and friends, the dolls establish a visual shorthand for the artist, a set of motifs and expressions that are distillations or signifiers of real human figures, yet are also unreal in their upholstered lifelessness, abject in their departure from their subjects. In What I corrupted was what is called the truth…, the doll wearing black is modelled after the artist and made with cuttings of her own hair. Likewise, the artist symbiotically takes on the persona and appearance of her dolls. In this way, Tchiprout’s dolls and her subsequent paintings span opposite concepts of real and imaginary, living and inanimate, forming a closed circuit of self-referential observation and world-building.

Having established her practice in printmaking, the artist’s transition to painting and sculpture also bears evidence of the mark-making of her earlier monoprints and etchings. Tchiprout considers how light arranges itself across the roughly hewn surface of the dolls’ faces, shadows falling into the concave impressions of her finger-marks in much the same way that tactile gesture informs her monoprints.

Influenced by themes of longing and anticipation in the literature of of Yiddish women writers such as Rachel Korn and Miriam Karpilove, and drawing from the bold female protagonists in French American author Anaïs Nin’s novels, in this installation Tchiprout’s asks whether the spatial dynamics of replicating one’s studio and oneself on a miniature scale can metaphorically relate to the exterior and interior experience of womanhood, the secret multitudes contained within. The artist blurs what is real and what is idealistic within her mimetic presentation of herself and her practice. In presenting a hermetic loop of feedback between herself and her dolls, she questions where the truth may lie in a secure image of safety and interiority.

Liorah Tchiprout (b. 1992, London) lives and works in London. She received her MA from Camberwell College of Art, London (2020), and earned her BA in Fine Art Printmaking at University of Brighton (2016). Solo exhibitions include Two Eyes Wide Open at the Edge of Dawn, Marlborough, London (2023); All Things are Kneeling, Brocket Gallery, London (2022); and Frontier at the Country of Night, Oxmarket Contemporary, Chichester (2022). Recent group exhibitions include The Darling of Reflection, Sid Motion Gallery, London (2024); Summer Exhibition, Royal Academy of Arts, London (2023), for which Tchiprout won the The Sunny Dupree Family Award for a Woman Artist; Face to Face: A Celebration of Portraiture, Marlborough, London (2023); Painted Prints, trio show with Jimmy Merris and Gillian Ayres, Marlborough, London (2023); New Contemporaries, South London Gallery, London (2021); and The Ingram Prize Exhibition, Unit 1 Gallery, London (2021), amongst others. She has been shortlisted for the Ruth Borchard Self Portrait Prize (2023), selected for the Bloomberg New Contemporaries (2021), and shortlisted for the The Ingram Prize (2021), the Signature Art Prize (2021) and the Ruth Borchard Self Portrait Prize (2020). Her collections include Government Art Collection, London; Ruth Borchard Next Generation Collection, London; Soho House Permanent Collection, Tel Aviv, Israel & London; and Clifford Chance Collection, London.