66 7/8 x 86 5/8 inches
Vigo Gallery presents Delacroix, the first solo exhibition in London by British artist Moira Cameron. A graduate of Chelsea College of Art, Cameron returns to her independent practice after decades of collaborative work - first with her late partner, artist David Spiller, and later with their son, Xavier Baxter.
The exhibition revisits Eugène Delacroix’s Women of Algiers (1834 and 1849), paintings that famously inspired generations, from van Gogh and Gauguin to Picasso. Cameron reimagines these orientalist interiors as quasi-self-portraits, reframing the historical female subjects through a contemporary female lens.
While Delacroix’s first version evokes a sense of distance and voyeurism, his second offers an invitation through the gaze of the women to enter the scene. Cameron embraces this shift but goes further, replacing passive subjecthood with visceral authorship. Her raw, unapologetically abstract mark-making, once culturally coded as masculine, becomes a radical gesture of feminine agency. These visceral, expressive brushstrokes dissolve traditional boundaries between artist and subject, inviting the viewer into the emotional and physical journey of creation. The historically objectified female body gives way to the body in action, subverting the male gaze not only in content, but in form.
Delacroix coincides with Cameron’s inclusion in the National Portrait Gallery’s 2025 Herbert Smith Freehills Kramer Portrait Award, where her shortlisted prizewinning painting A Life Lived will be on view from 10 July to 12 October.