Roxana Halls (born 1974) is an English figurative painter known for her images of wayward women who refuse to conform to society’s expectations.
Hall has said that she often equates painting with performance[4] and that her models collude with her in creating theatrical scenarios for which the viewer is invited to tease out narratives.
Referencing everything from high art and philosophy to the zeitgeist (including, at different times, Charcot’s ‘The Iconographie Photographique de la Salpêtrière,’ Hélène Cixous’s écriture feminine, the war time paintings of Dame Laura Knight, Bosch’s The Garden of Earthly Delights, the songs of Nick Cave, Peaches and Robert Wyatt, Sylvia Plath, avantgarde cinema, and the fashion for glamorising the past), Halls’s paintings examine gender, class, identity and sexuality.
She collects costumes - often foraged from charity or thrift shops - from different countries and periods, aware that the stories of their owners may remain forever unknowable.
Her paintings focus on the materiality of people’s lived environments, seducing the viewer with exquisite still lifes or her emphasis on fabrics and hair.
One of Halls’s most renowned series - 'Laughing While' (2012 onwards) – depicts women engaged in more transgressive acts that interrogate encultured norms around femininity.
Halls cites Cixous’s retelling of the Chinese general Sun Tse ‘who decapitates a group of women he is trying to train as soldiers, so disconcerted, so disgusted is he by their persistent laughter and refusal to take his orders seriously.
Inspired by Artemisia Gentileschi’s Self-portrait as St. Catherine, Halls’s exhibition 'Crime Spree' (2021) examines the taboo subject of women and criminality.
In 2022, Halls featured on Episode 1 of BBC's Extraordinary Portraits hosted by Tinie Tempah where she was commissioned to paint twin sisters who survived a crocodile attack in Mexico.