At Perrotin, Painter Danielle Orchard Makes an Allegory of Matrescence

<img decoding="async" class="wp-image-1598743 size-full-width" src="https://observer.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2025/11/2025_08_20_PERROTIN77852-e1762622254435.jpg?quality=80&w=970" alt="A stylized painting depicts a reclining nude pregnant woman covered partly by a green cloth, a small child pulls at his umbilical cord near her, and an audience of people watching from below. The scene uses geometric forms and muted earthy colors." width="970" height="647" data-caption='Steeped in surreal imagery, <em>Presentation</em> envisions the surgical amphitheater as a space of both performance and observation. <span class="media-credit">Photographed by Paul Salveson. Courtesy of Perrotin.</span>’>

The woman reclines on the operating table as though it were a chaise lounge. Her baby boy wrenches his umbilical cord from her womb, trailing bloody footprints across the stage as an audience watches. What makes Danielle Orchard’s Presentation so marvelously unnerving is that the painting contorts the weight of transformation around the diffuse and dreamy voyeurism of the audience, both within the painting and beyond it. The piece was born from Orchard’s own experience of childbirth; she delivered her firstborn son by way of cesarean surgery under the bright lights and piercing observation of the operating theater. In her now-closed Perrotin exhibition, “Firstborn,” Danielle Orchard rendered variously melancholic female forms in the throes of pregnancy, childbirth and motherhood. Engaging the female form through modern, classical and contemporary contexts, Orchard hones in on the somatic and psychological metamorphosis brought on by maternity with lyrical tenderness and exacting vigor.

Orchard’s women are parsed through benevolent abstraction, illuminated in rich swaths of color and diaphanous daylight, lounging contemplatively or gazing directly toward the viewer with a faraway, saturnine expression. They are classically informed, exhibiting the allegorical depth and configuration we have come to expect from the female figure in art. Yet Orchard’s women court transgression; suspended in very singular, vulnerable moments, they appear resigned to their fate under observation. In Orchard’s Ophelia (2025), a woman stands nude in the flat plane of her home, kitchen chairs and flower vases shift around her, a baby and a dog tread the ground beneath her. Her pose is classical—bordering on contrapposto—yet her stoicism does not necessarily evoke strength, but rather exposure and expectation.

“The female body is often used allegorically,” Orchard tells Observer. “That flexibility is something I think is very interesting about both being a woman and depicting women…. The female body in particular is used so freely to denote really complex ideas about human experience.”

The artist has always worked within the webbings of womanhood; her previous paintings arranged clusters of women in bathhouses, on midsummer picnics, on tennis greens, holding books and cigarettes and gem-colored liquor bottles. Orchard’s paintings are in dialogue with the artists and histories that came before them. At once, Orchard’s coteries speak to Manet’s absinthe-minded muses, Rousseau’s pacific jungle girls and Picasso’s amorphously lithe demoiselles. They stretch to corners of classical and prehistoric female allegory as well, encompassing the female figures of Titian, Botticelli and Artemisia, even swallowing up Neolithic Venus figurines.

“Firstborn” marks a significant alteration in the artist’s experience and subject matter, as she encloses upon the topic of maternity with the same delicate precision and encyclopedic empathy she applied to other phases of womanhood. After the birth of her son, a chasm emerged between Orchard and the typified ingenues of her past work; she found herself resonating with another signature female allegory, concurrent with her present stage of womanhood: the Madonna.

“Having my own body changed during pregnancy and feeling the metaphorical but also the physical weight of those changes enhanced my understanding of what the character of Mary may have been experiencing,” Orchard explains. “There are so many different emotions and moral expectations—all of these things that are placed on this one figure as placeholder for an incredibly rich and dynamic experience. And I think that that’s true for every phase of a woman’s life, but the childbearing years in particular. Whether or not one chooses to have children, the anticipation and the expectation still weigh on you.“

Hatching (2025) exemplifies this tension. In the painting, three women sit on a beach, absorbed by a nest of hatching turtle eggs. Waves lap at their legs and a fishfly bobs along the current; the women appear less in community with one another than in internal consonance. One woman lies in repose, her pregnancy represented as a bubble of dripping water, another woman braces herself, her arms wrapped pensively around her shoulders as she stares at the nest, and the last woman rises on her forearms with anticipation. In their solitude and solemnity, they appear as stages of sainthood, interacting not with each other but with the mercurial auspice of motherhood.

“I’m interested in the potential that painting has to show this metaphysical distance between figures,” Orchard says of the work. “The viewer is meant to understand that this is like a passage of time, even though it’s like a still image, you can suggest, you know, like an entire lifetime, essentially. … [The experience of pregnancy is] such a singular experience that it actually is kind of isolating—no one experience, despite sharing particular narrative details, is exactly the same as another person’s.”

With “Firstborn,” Orchard creates a postpartum narrative that is malleable and yet reactive to those that preceded it, especially as it pertains to the archetypal mothers and women depicted throughout art history. In A First Cut, a mother cuts her son’s hair on the banks of a lake. The horizon cuts through a surreal twilight; the moon and sun hang congruously in the sky. The scene has a mythical quality to it, and a sense of foreboding settles over the quotidian act as the mother wields the shears mid-cut. Orchard once regarded cutting her son’s flaxen curls as though she were committing a sin. “Samson and Delilah…” she says, referencing the biblical betrayal. “Female wiles have undone this man whose strength is in his curls.” A First Cut carries a weight and synchronicity that rhymes with the Bible story, yet it renders not the hero of Nazarite and his traitorous lover but a loving mother and her small son.

“That relay between images that you know from art history and then the life that you’re living,” Orchard concludes. “And that kind of constant conversation is ultimately what I’m interested in about painting and that it’s inexhaustible. You can always find these echoes of art history in life.”

Danielle Orchard’s upcoming solo shows at Perrotin will open in Paris in March 2026 and in New York in September 2027. 

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