British painter Selma Parlour (b.1976, Johannesburg) lives and works in London after completing a PhD in Art at Goldsmiths, University of London in 2014 and a MFA at University of Reading, Berkshire, UK in 2002. Exploring the technical problems of the medium of painting, Parlour makes paintings that are meticulously rendered through soft films of oil on linen to look as though they are drawn, dyed or printed. Her paintings are effectively diagrams or templates; trompe l'oeil illusion is codified through shaded bands, and colour is in-laid as if through a process of marquetry. Colour is a veil (not a skin). The literal transparency of colour borrows from the white primer beneath so that colour glows as if lit from behind. This backlit quality is reminiscent of the screen and the photograph. The analogue apes the digital; whilst the space of painting is imagined as a two-dimensional stage space that curtails fictive distance as it represents it. Recent solo and duo exhibitions include those at Pi Artworks, London and Istanbul (2020, 2019 and 2018); House of St Barnabas, London (2016); Dio Horia, Mykonos, Greece (2015); MOT International Projects, London (2012); and Horton Gallery, New York (with Yelena Popova) (2012). Her work was featured in Bloomberg New Contemporaries, ICA, London (2011). In 2014, Parlour was selected for Thames and Hudson's publication 100 Painters of Tomorrow. In 2020, she won an Arts Council England Creative Development Award, and in 2018, Parlour was granted the Mark Rothko Memorial Trust Award. She was the recipient of the Sunny Dupree Family Award for a Woman Artist at the Summer Exhibition, Royal Academy of Arts, London (2017) and was a Prizewinner at the John Moores Painting Prize, Walker Gallery, Liverpool (2016). Parlour is represented by Dio Horia, Athens, and Pi Artworks, London and Istanbul.