I Was Always Good: Tallulah Dirnfeld

In I Was Always Good, Tallulah Dirnfeld presents a series of paintings that examine the quiet rituals of control and self-containment. Faceless, uniformed figures occupy tightly composed interiors. Neatly made beds, braided hair, polished chrome. Where every surface is ordered and every gesture restrained, carrying a faint sense of nostalgia.

The title, taken from a note by photographer Francesca Woodman, “I was always good at holding onto nothing”, becomes the emotional core of the exhibition. Informed by the psychological framework of Alice Miller’s The Drama of the Gifted Child, the work reflects on the ways children adapt to their environments by anticipating need, performing goodness, and suppressing vulnerability. Here, their emotional containment isn’t necessarily dramatized. Instead, it permeates the space as an atmosphere.

Dirnfeld’s compositions suggest worlds where beauty and order verge on estrangement. Beds are too precise. Figures too motionless. Horses too still. Each scene rendered with an unsettling, clinical sharpness. These may be spaces that imply history, where something significant has occurred, but we know of no narrative.

At its core, I Was Always Good reflects not on rebellion, but on the quiet persistence of endurance. In these restrained scenes, Dirnfeld examines the complexity of control. How stillness, repetition, and silence can hold both safety and strain, offering a nuanced meditation on presence, absence, and the fragile boundaries of self.