Chelsea Culprit’s work explores the performance of gender within the labor market and the expression of gender in the natural world. The artist revisits subjects and techniques associated with historical painting, recoding latent symbols of patriarchy toward an expanded social imaginary. Composed as much of emotional registers as of descriptive forms, Culprit’s work intertwines representations of the body’s capacity for labor, play, display, and expression, addressing the performed authenticity of identity alongside the tensions between freedom and personal bondage.

Moving fluidly between the pictorial language of folk traditions and the materiality of the real world, Culprit works across media including neon light, sculptural assemblage, and installation, while maintaining painting as the central axis of the practice. Within these works, the artist constructs scenes populated by figures whose sexuality and gender are expressed with uninhibited freedom. These characters exist beyond the conventions of the male gaze and are situated in spaces where such expressions become possible — nightclubs, gardens, and forests.

Rendered with defined contours yet capable of transformation, Culprit’s figures often merge with one another, with plants, with fields of abstract color, or with objects drawn from domestic environments. These bodies function simultaneously as laborers and priestesses within the symbolic world of the artist’s practice, embodying narratives of becoming as well as contemporary mythologies and archetypes that connect past histories with speculative futures.

Recent solo exhibitions include Pole on Break, Queer Thoughts, New York (2022); Malas Madres, Lulu, Mexico City (2019); Fear of Seduction, Queer Thoughts at Maureen Paley, London (2019); DMing Purgatory, Queer Thoughts, New York (2018); Fishnets, Uma Certa Falta de Coerencia, Porto (2017); Right to Remain Elegant, Galeria La Esperanza at Barba Azul, Mexico City (2017); and Miss Universe, Yautepec, Mexico City (2016). Her work has been presented in recent group exhibitions at TANK Shanghai, Shanghai (2020); Museo de Arte de Zapopan, Guadalajara (2020); Palais de Tokyo, Paris (2019); Museum of Modern Art Warsaw, Warsaw (2019); Revolver Galería, Lima (2019); Australian Centre for Contemporary Art, Melbourne (2018); and Museo de Arte Carrillo Gil, Mexico City (2018).