Rebecca Gilpin

Rebecca Gilpin is a London-based painter whose practice explores rhythm as it appears in the natural world, music, and urban life. Her oil paintings serve as records of her decision-making process, shaped by a deep sensitivity to her environment. Each canvas becomes both a journey and a portrait of an inner landscape, where colour, form, and movement collide. Gilpin's work is rooted in a deep investigation into the materiality of oil paint, experimenting with thick and thin applications, layering, and the tension between transparency and opacity. She draws from a wide visual lineage, reinterpreting past artists into her own language. Light plays a central role in her work, transforming color into an emotional force. For Gilpin, color is energetic and emotive, capable of disrupting or harmonizing a painting. Many of her paintings are titled after songs or song lyrics that inspired them, reinforcing the interplay between sound and image. Her practice is as much about formal concerns—rhythm, depth, transparency—as it is about perception, sensation, and the experience of being. Her paintings frequently play with perception, using layering to prompt the viewer to ask, “Which color was applied first?” They invite close looking, drawing the eye to underpainting and traces of past gestures. To create an immersive experience, Gilpin often installs her larger works low on the wall. She has exhibited internationally, and her work is held in private collections globally and on public display in spaces such as the HIV Ward at Chelsea and Westminster Hospital and the Royal Marsden Hospital.