Tallulah Dirnfeld paints the violence hidden inside being good.

The Los Angeles oil painter works in soft pinks and creams, the palette of girlhood bedrooms and ballet recitals, yet what emerges from these tender colours is something far more unsettling. Faceless figures in uniform, chrome horses frozen mid-gallop, severed braids arranged like relics, her canvases stage performed goodness as a kind of theatre in which the audience never quite knows whether they’re watching devotion or dissection.

Her series “I Was Always Good” centres on the distortion that occurs when childhood memories age. Nostalgia, trauma, comfort, and fear mutate together into something both tender and threatening. The deliberate blurring in her technique mirrors this – precision giving way to soft surrealism, as if the paintings themselves are forgetting.

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