Harriet Gillett: If Paris Was a Woman

Gallery Maison Bertaux

Hot Sheet is delighted to present a new solo exhibition showcasing the work of Harriet Gillett. If Paris Was a Woman brings together a new body of paintings that explore the poetics of city life through the lens of the contemporary flâneur.

In If Paris Was a Woman, Harriet Gillett draws inspiration from the idea of the flâneur, an observer who moves through the city with curiosity and slowness. The title nods to the 1996 documentary Paris Was a Woman, which celebrates the community of women artists and writers in early 20th-century Paris, a quiet parallel to the imaginative world Harriet evokes. The exhibition captures the spirit of timeless urban settings, cafés, theatres, side streets, and rooms where lives unfold and overlap. Many renowned Soho institutions inspired the work and act as portals into a dream-like cityscape where observation, documentation and memory intertwine through the artist's unique lens of magical realism.

Harriet’s is influenced by the café cultures of the Impressionist period and the writers and artists who made such spaces central to their work, though unlike more overtly observational approaches, her paintings reach toward a subtle reverence to the ordinary. Through loosely drawn figures, spectral outlines, and vibrant gestures, she constructs paintings that dissolve the boundaries of time and place. Her canvases feel both nostalgic and electric; drawn from the everyday, but transformed into something charged and cinematic.

People, music, overheard conversations, and objects become starting points for exploration as the painted figures in Harriet’s work are captured mid-movement or deep in thought - ghostlike presences that emerge slowly, softly from the surface. The titles of the paintings, often borrowed from songs or poetry, hint at narrative but resist clarity, encouraging the viewer to follow emotional threads rather than storylines.

If Paris Was a Woman openned on the 26th September at Gallery Maison Bertaux and has been curated by Hot Sheet and hosted by Hooligan Art Dealer.