Florence Reekie | Preen

June 4 – July 10, 2026

Sargent’s Daughters is pleased to present Preen, the debut solo exhibition of Scottish painter Florence Reekie. Reekie will have a solo exhibition in the gallery’s main space next summer, and Preen is conceptualized as a prelude to a larger series of works. Centered on the idea of “getting ready,” this new series of intimate oil paintings explores the construction of femininity in private, in-between moments.

Reekie’s work is preoccupied with luscious surfaces, as she renders silk, skin, and flower petals on deadstock fabrics. Reekie sources deadstock silks and incorporates their colors and textures into the finished works. Many pieces still have visible seams running through them as traces of their previous lives. The paintings themselves are virtuositically rendered in delicate layers of oil, recalling Renaissance portraiture or Dutch still lives.

For Reekie, Preen evokes instinctual animal behaviours of grooming, as well as an association with human vanity. These works capture the transformation and preparation that goes into feminized appearances, the work one does in order to be seen. Beauty is not a static state in Reekie’s work, rather, it is a choice worth examining in detail.

Florence Reekie (b. 1991, Scotland) lives and works in Seissan, France. She is a figurative oil painter whose work engages with themes of perception, iconography, and coding within compositions, while also experimenting with the materiality of paint. Reekie’s paintings investigate societal relationships with clothing and fabric, using drapery not merely as staging but as a central element for exploring identity, vanity, and the ways we construct and present ourselves. Through depictions of crumpled laundry and intricate textiles, she reveals the quiet power of the overlooked, drawing attention to the armors and beauty ‘secrets’ we use to shape personal and collective identity.

Reekie had her first solo exhibition 'Sumptuary Laws’ with MAMA (London, UK) in 2023 and has exhibited at Annely Juda (London, UK), Aberdeen Art Gallery (Aberdeen, UK), Royal Arts Society of London (London, UK), and in MEGA Art Fair (Milan, Italy), among others. Her work has been published in Art Quarterly (Spring 2022) and featured on ArtBasel.com (2024). She was the recipient of the Art Fund ‘Museum of the Year’ Aberdeen Art Gallery Micro Commission in 2021.