Síomha Harrington:
A Spy in the House of Love

ALICE BLACK is delighted to present A Spy in the House of Love, the debut UK solo exhibition of Síomha Harrington, co-curated with Maudji Mendel. The exhibition will preview at the gallery’s Fitzrovia space in London on Thursday 19 March 2026 (6-8PM).

A Spy in the House of Love invites audiences into the shifting terrains of presence, identity, and relational power. Harrington’s work represents an ongoing exploration of intimacy and the dynamics of desire, probing the boundaries between subject and object. Her practice presents the body as a contested site where agency and objectification continuously intersect, evolve, and converse.

Síomha Harrington (b. 1997, Dublin) lives and works in Brighton, UK. She completed her BA at the University of Brighton in 2023 and was selected for New Contemporaries in 2024, presenting work at the Levinsky Gallery, Plymouth, followed by an exhibition at the ICA, London. Since then, Harrington has participated in notable exhibitions including Once Upon a Time in London at Saatchi

Yates and Unveiled Desires at Richard Saltoun Gallery, and in 2025 she presented her first solo show in Shanghai, Watching through a Window. These milestones reflect her expanding national and international profile, positioning her among a new generation of artists attracting growing critical and curatorial attention.

A Spy in the House of Love comprises twelve new small-scale paintings alongside a central large painting, contextualised by Valentine Dobrée’s masterwork ‘Black Gloves’ (1930), generously loaned by the RAW Collection. The exhibition resides at the intersection of feminist inquiry, fetish aesthetics, performance, and psychological theatre. At the heart of Harrington’s investigation is the negotiation of power: who holds it, who performs it, and how it shifts, both within the image and in the interplay between artwork and audience.

Many works inhabit liminal states of agency and submission, fantasy and reality, exposure and concealment. These “in-between” spaces suggest a psychological as well as a narrative terrain, where identity remains unstable and continuously negotiated. Harrington’s precise deliberate brushstrokes, echoes gestures of control. Her figurative compositions often exaggerate or subtly manipulate bodily forms, heightening narrative tension and drawing attention to charged details.

Recurring visual motifs such as latex gloves, stage makeup, ribbons and choreographed gestures operate as a visual language of submission and desire. Yet power in Harrington’s works is never fixed; it circulates between artwork and viewer. Her paintings collapse the boundary between observer and subject, involving viewers in the dynamics of looking and dominion. This deliberate ambiguity resists moral resolution, presenting intimacy and identity as charged, paradoxical and perpetually unstable.

With special thanks to Maudji Mendel and the RAW Collection (Rediscovering Art by Women)