Grace Mcnerney: Crème Fraîche Salon

Grace’s paintings are a pursuit through the liminal and mundane in search of the sex, religion, and death that underpin popular culture. Grace’s oil paintings are often inspired by charity shop discoveries - vinyl covers, old magazines, recipe books - that speak to the fashions and fads of earlier generations. She prefers her paintings saturated and soft, achieved through a buildup of thin layers of paint blended to evoke the slightly out- of-focus images of her subjects.

Her degree show presentation at Chelsea College of Arts (2023) was a meditation on regional open-plan office culture and a commentary on the peripheral microcultures generated by the service economy. More recently, Grace’s focus has been on the transience of pop culture phenomena: how people are collectively enthralled by an event or place or person for a period of time, before collectively moving on to the next big thing, almost simultaneously.

For her Crème Fraîche salon, Grace presents a new series of work titled With You Always, a reflection on the female ideal and its role as a keystone of post-war popular culture. The paintings tell a story of contradiction through female desires, pressures and realities; Seven Brides for Seven Brothers meets Diana, Princess of Wales.

While the content is contradictory, there is harmony in colour and form. Love is in the Barrio and Apollo depict figures from adult magazines, drawing inspiration from the portraiture of Gainsborough and Van Dyke and using the format to subvert historical hierarchies in figurative painting and question who or what is worth painting. Here, painting at scale affords the subject a particular intimacy with the viewer and introduces a sensationalism that tenderly undermines the self-importance of the medium.

Other works in the series explore the consistent demand, across time, for the performance of flawless femininity: Death of St Bernadette juxtaposes the eponymous Catholic icon with a fifties pin-up model: totems superficially antithetical to one another, but really just the same figure in the social cloaking of different eras. Savoury Toasts, animage taken from a recipe book inset with excerpts from a tome on dollshouses, reflects on the conveyor belt of social expectation and the issuance of detailed instructions to women at every stage of life.

With You Always speaks to the endurance of cultural ideals and contradictions surrounding femininity in the zeitgeist. Collectively, the series can be seen as a collage built from decades of visual references that, while often very ‘of their time’, somehow follow us across the decades and through evolutions in media, informing the generation of new popular culture icons that aren’t as innovative as they might first appear. The work is, then, perhaps best seen as a quiet warning as well as a nostalgic promise.

Grace graduated from the BA Fine Art programme at Chelsea College of Arts in 2023. She joined Crème Fraîche in its inaugural year, and after a short hiatus now returns for the second year. Her work has been shown across London (Crème Fraîche at the ICA, Bomb Factory, Seventeen Gallery, Millbank Tower), and in Salisbury (Vanner Gallery), and she has recently been shortlisted for the Hari Art Prize, which will announce its winner in November 2025.