It’s her first solo exhibition in the UK, but it doesn’t try to grab attention or make a big entrance. Instead, it draws you in slowly. Her paintings sit with ideas of intimacy, desire, and identity, softening the boundary between the one who looks and the one being seen.
The body, in her work, never feels settled, it shifts between control and vulnerability, never fully landing on either.
Harrington, who was born in Dublin in 1997 and is now based in Brighton, graduated from the University of Brighton in 2023. She’s already building momentum, having been selected for New Contemporaries 2024 and shown at both Levinsky Gallery and the Institute of Contemporary Arts, alongside other exhibitions like Once Upon a Time in London at the Saatchi Gallery.
The exhibition brings together twelve small, intimate paintings and one larger central piece. There’s also an interesting inclusion: Black Gloves (1930) by Valentine Dobrée, on loan from the RAW Collection.
The whole space carries a quiet sense of theatre, touching on feminist ideas, performance, and hints of fetish, while circling around questions of power. Who has it, who gives it up, and how easily it changes hands.
A lot of the work lives in that in-between space: control and submission, reality and fantasy, revealing and hiding. Her brushwork is careful, almost restrained, but then you notice small distortions in the body, details that pull you closer and feel both intimate and slightly off.
Recurring elements, latex gloves, stage makeup, ribbons, deliberate gestures, start to form their own subtle language around desire and control. But nothing is fixed or fully explained. The relationship between you and the paintings keeps shifting as you look. Rather than spelling things out, A Spy in the House of Love leaves you with something more open, layered, unresolved, and recognisably human.
