Raised in Paris by Haitian parents, painter Delphine Desane promotes ebullient and effusive depictions of motherhood and Black femininity. Desane bridges the worlds of art and fashion—a stylist by training, she decisively pivoted toward painting after becoming a mother, honing her practice on maternity leave. Her work quickly achieved acclaim, with Desane collaborating with both Vogue Italia for the cover of its 2020 Sustainability Issue, and designer Jacquemus on the 2020–21 Spring/Summer campaign. These collaborations led to successes in the art world, as Desane has since mounted her first solo show at Luce Gallery in Turin and will be included in the group exhibition Convergent Evolutions: The Conscious of Body at Pace Gallery, New York, from 10 September–23 October 2021.
Desane’s scenes exude positivity and confidence in a better future: Her startlingly immediate figures are emblems of pride and conviction, depicting a loving and honest narrative of her experiences and aspirations and reflecting her own complex identity. Speaking to the boundary-challenging nature of her practice, Desane says, “the work has a lot to do with my own experiences as a Black woman, a Black mother, being an immigrant in the US, being a child of immigrant parents, and being French and Caribbean.”1
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