Known for her meticulously constructed interiors and the women who inhabit them, Dianne Gall has shifted her lens from the domestic rooms of her earlier works, to the charged, cinematic interiors of vehicles. In DRIVE, the central motif remains: women in states of solitude, contemplation, or escape. Only now, they are set against the gleam of chrome, the sweep of headlights, and the open-ended narrative of the road.

The car—long upheld as a masculine symbol of the 1960s and 70s, a muscle-bound emblem of power and bravado—becomes something else in Gall’s hands. Polished to a gleaming, almost camp perfection, these immaculate vehicles are now steered by women, subverting their mythology and recasting them as a character: a repository of memory, a symbol of autonomy and independence, a vehicle of pursuit and desire.

The women within them rarely meet our gaze. They glance out of windows, turn away, half-hidden in the play of shadow and neon glow, leaving the viewer suspended in a moment of unanswered tension. It invites the questions: Where are they going? What are they leaving behind?

Gall’s personal history merges with painterly construction. She builds each image meticulously—late-night photo shoots with staged sets and vintage props—sourcing models and cars, elaborate clothing and fabrics. She digitally assembles the photographs, manipulating light, colour, and composition, before transferring the final concept to canvas. The result is both hyper-real and dreamlike—stills from a movie that exist only in her mind.

Gall’s paintings echo the mystery of Edward Hopper, yet are unmistakably her own form of contemporary realism. Her treatment of surfaces—gleaming metal, soft skin, flowing fabric—is laborious and expressive. She embraces the complexity of painting with technical mastery, allowing her strokes to remain visible; an honesty which reinforces the idea that everything seems almost too perfect to be believed.

DRIVE pulses with a lush, saturated, cinematic palette. Gall gives us a dream captured in oil: women behind the wheel, caught in a suspended narrative, poised somewhere between past and present, painstakingly real and seductively unreal.

Anthea Mentzalis
October, 2025

 

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