Over the past four decades, Delprat’s multifaceted practice has engaged the human condition as its focus, exploring life and death in an oeuvre that spans various mediums. After finding success for her distinctively primitive style of figurative painting, following her residency at the prestigious Villa Medici in Rome between 1985 and 1995, Delprat turned her focus to video, theater, interviews, installations and projects for radio, all whilst continuing to paint. Since the late aughts, the artist’s painting practice has been shaped by an encyclopedic research process compiling a remarkable archive of sources. Delprat’s works, together, comprise a sprawling constellation of references to literature, film, radio, philosophy, internet databases, recorded histories and art history. The title of this exhibition, ‘MONSTER SOUP,’ reflects this multidimensional approach by referencing a variety of sources from popular culture. The poster for the exhibition, created by Delprat, reflects this syncretism: the image, taken from a British 1820s etching depicting a woman in horror at the monstrous contents of a magnified drop of Thames water, is interspersed with Delprat’s painted characters. Likened to an iconologist, she distills eclectic sources of inspiration into an expansive inventory—a world both fortuitous and deliberate, beautiful and grotesque, where themes of memory, identity, recording and legacy coalesce to remind us that the past is a construction and the present is fleeting. ‘Intellectually, I start from everything I see’ she says, ‘...there is no real prep work, except all this reading, all these curiosities, the newspapers I flick through, the programmes I listen to and all the photos that I take or cut out. The preparation is simply what I am living.’

Monster Soup is on view through Saturday 9 March at Hauser & Wirth 26 bis rue François 1er, Paris 75008