About me?

Artist statement

Irene Dompé (b. 2004, Milan) is an Italian painter based in London. Informed by her background in psychology, she approaches painting as a means of interrogating human experience and giving material form to its psychological dimensions. Carrying the accelerated experience of living between big cities and growing up online, her practice examines the pressures and contradictions of contemporary life. Her work seeks to unravel what a highly-networked, image-saturated culture has meant cognitively, personally and collectively.

Drawing from the realist tradition of classical Italian painting, Dompé contaminates realism with surreal associations, saturated colours and geometric forms, developing a pictorial language that is both conditioned by and responsive to contemporary visual culture. Working primarily with oil and acrylic paint, her paintings often begin with found images, sketches or digital collages, which then evolve through intuitive associations of visuals and ideas, layering imagery and colour into combinations that may initially appear absurd. The white canvas becomes a playground, or a stage, on which ‘puppets’ can be placed, rearranged and charged with materiality. As figures and forms emerge, the initial image is allowed to shift, creating a space where fragmented reality is reorganised through dream logic.

Her frequent use of thick, tactile paint offers a physical and materially specific response to a reality increasingly permeated by technology. Dynamic bodies, shaped partly by Dompé’s lifelong practice of gymnastics, often emerge as subjects, serving as vehicles for experiences of tension, discipline and a longing for liberation. Ultimately, they embody a desire to understand how freedom and agency might be negotiated amid forces that continually compete for control over perception.