4me4you features “You Should Smile More”, a new exhibition of paintings by American artist Melody Tuttle.
The exhibition explores performed femininity and the quiet, everyday rituals that often go unseen. Tuttle focuses on those in-between moments, getting dressed and undressed, preparing to go out, hiding away, or simply being alone.
Rather than capturing the performance itself, her paintings linger on what happens just before and after it.
Tuttle’s work has long centred on women in intimate, often solitary situations.
Her figures are painted in rich, saturated colours and placed within dreamlike interiors and landscapes that feel both familiar and slightly strange.
In You Should Smile More, she moves further into domestic spaces, bringing together architecture, light and the body in ways that make these environments feel deeply personal.
There is rarely a clear story or beginning and ending in Tuttle’s paintings. Instead, she is interested in the feeling around a particular moment. A woman might pause in front of a mirror, caught somewhere between getting ready to step into the world and retreating from it. Elsewhere, figures seem suspended in quiet spaces, neither fully in motion nor completely still.
It is in these pauses that Tuttle’s work becomes particularly compelling. The line between who we are in private and the identities we perform for others starts to blur, leaving us to consider what remains when, even briefly, those roles are put aside.
Artist: Melody Tuttle
