The painter reframing ‘dandies’ for the female gaze

Comprising 10 large-scale portraits in Sarah Ball’s signature airy colors, new exhibit “Titled” challenges gender conventions and celebrates exuberant self-expression.

Writing in 1863, the French poet and critic Charles Baudelaire turned his eye to a striking faction of Parisian and English high society, one militantly fanatical for appearances — so much that some were said to polish their boots with Champagne. “Dandyism is a mysterious institution,” he said of the cult of the fastidiously-dressed, 19th-century male, “no less peculiar than the duel.” Though himself no stranger to decadence — with a predilection for satin, velvet and changing his hair on a whim, Baudelaire squandered an inheritance with his louche taste for clothing and opium — he identified in the dandy’s subversive character a “burning desire to create a personal form of originality.” Scores of subcultures have embraced and interpreted the archetype in the decades since. Rather than Beau Brummell’s crisply-tied cravat, today the term “dandy” may summon visions of Harry Styles in a string of freshwater pearls or playwright Jeremy O. Harris’ natty Thom Browne suiting. But its preening, self-curated elegance remains, beyond limits of the gender binary or preconceived notions of how one “should” dress. “There’s not one definitive description,” observed the British artist Sarah Ball in a video call with CNN. “Gender norms are so blurred now, fantastically. It’s a moving scale, wherever we choose to be.” The concept of the dandy in the twenty-first century — and how it may be defined or disrupted — is the connective thread of Ball’s first New York solo exhibition, “Tilted,” which debuted at Stephen Friedman Gallery in Tribeca earlier this year. Comprising 10 large-scale, tightly composed portraits in Ball’s signature airy stretches of color, the show challenges conventions of gender and celebrates the exuberance of self-expression. Each of the personalities represented in “Tilted” is dressed in their own idiosyncratic accoutrements, rendered in minute detail: rakish beribboned headgear, delicate lace collars and bonnets, expressive makeup, oversized eyewear and, in one instance, even a cocktail glass, holding a slosh of liquid and the briny green of a Castelvetrano olive. Ball — who works from a studio in the small English town of St Ives, Cornwall, where artists have been drawn to the light and the sea for generations — typically finds her subjects through social media or on the street, attracted by their “degree of complete individuality,” she told CNN.