Alice Delhanty's debut solo exhibition ‘Invented Fire’ opens at Tache, London

Alice Delhanty's first solo exhibition, Invented Fire, opened at Tache on Newman Street in Fitzrovia on 24 September 2026. The show presents fifteen new paintings in acrylic and oil, among a large triptych, all made over the past year. It marks a significant step for Delhanty, who was born in 2001 and has been exhibiting in group shows in London since her student years, and for Tache, a gallery whose programme is devoted to emerging artists.

Installation view Invented Fire, Alice Delhanty, Tache, London. Image credit Thomas Moen at Reliant Imaging.

While in New Zealand, Delhanty filled sketchbooks with gouaches, watercolours and charcoal drawings made outdoors. Those studies became the basis for the paintings now on show, which draw on the scale of the landscape, the heat of the climate and the shifting weather she encountered there. Colour is a key element of the works. In Parasol, thin layers of pale blue and sun-faded yellow are laid over one another, while Lapse and Tattoo use denser, more physical brushwork in deep pink. Across the larger canvases, boats, bathers and their swimsuits gradually emerge from the layers of paint, and some surfaces are scattered with pieces of mirrored tile.

Installation view Invented Fire, Alice Delhanty, Tache, London. Image credit Thomas Moen at Reliant Imaging.

The title is taken from an essay by the French poet and critic Guillaume Apollinaire, in which he considers the human and artistic urge to capture light and remake it by hand. Delhanty describes her own process in similar terms, first the experience of a place, then its reworking in the studio. She cites the British painter Prunella Clough and the American painter Susan Rothenberg as influences, and like them she begins with loose, unplanned marks, allowing figures and colour to develop as the painting progresses. Travel is a recurring theme in her practice, which she describes as aiming for "a haptic visual response, closing the circle between my hand, the surface, and the eye."

Installation view Invented Fire, Alice Delhanty, Tache, London. Image credit Thomas Moen at Reliant Imaging.

Delhanty studied for a foundation diploma at Hereford College of Arts before completing a BA in Fine Art at City & Guilds of London Art School in 2024, where she won the Chadwyck-Healey Prize for Painting. She was also runner-up for the Skinners' Company Philip Connard Travel Award in 2023 and shortlisted for the Painter-Stainers' Prize in 2022, and her work has been shown in London, Glasgow and Cardiff, including at the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition. Tache first presented her paintings at the Minor Attractions art fair in 2025.

Invented Fire is on show at Tache, 36 Newman Street, London, until 29 October 2026. The exhibition is accompanied by an essay by the writer Anna Moss and a catalogue published by the gallery.

Find out more at tachegallery.com.