Roxana Halls is a British figurative painter known for her psychologically charged portraits that explore identity, gender, performance and the shifting social roles of women. Her work reflects her longstanding fascination with theatre and the performative body, a passion rooted in her childhood ambition to become an actress. This sense of drama is central to her painting style, which often stages figures in moments of tension, mischief or defiance.
Her works are noted for their dark glamour, humour and subversive
approach to female representation.
Halls gained recognition through repeated exhibitions at the BP Portrait Award, the National Portrait Gallery and the Royal Society of Portrait Painters, and she has since built an international presence. Her portraits have been commissioned by major institutions, including the National Galleries of Scotland and BBC Arts. She has also been commissioned by Disney Studios, who acquired her work for the production of the film Haunted Mansion. Her solo exhibitions have appeared at Haus Kunst Mitte in Berlin, Colley Ison Gallery in Birmingham and multiple London venues, while her group exhibitions span London, Europe and the United States.
Across her practice Halls challenges imposed expectations placed on women and uses wit, theatricality and expressive composition to reveal the complexity of self‑ presentation. Critics describe her paintings as offering a response to self censorship and a celebration of unruly or unapologetic femininity. Alongside her studio work she has also contributed to curatorial projects with the InFems Art Collective, supporting feminist dialogues in contemporary art. Halls creates artworks that balance emotional insight with bold visual vitality.
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FAUX FUR (Unknown Women), 2025 Sold -
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Roxana Halls was born in 1974 in Plaistow, London, where she continues to live and work. Her early ambition was to become an actress, and the sense of drama, performance, and staged self-presentation that shaped her childhood remains central to her painting practice today. She completed a foundation course at Plymouth College of Art and Design in 1992 to 1993 before moving to London, where she describes herself as having developed her practice largely independently: visiting the National Gallery, painting constantly, and building her career on a professional basis from the outset. She has exhibited consistently since the late 1990s, with her first BP Portrait Award appearance at the National Portrait Gallery in 1994.
Halls works in figurative oil painting, with portraiture as her primary mode. Her canvases are psychologically charged and compositionally bold: figures are caught in states of tension, defiance, or mischief, their expressions and postures suggesting interior lives that resist easy categorisation. Her visual language draws on the traditions of theatrical staging and the history of female representation in Western painting, but turns both on their head. Where the female figure has historically been positioned as passive subject, Halls restores agency, complexity, and wit. Her work has been described as a response to self-censorship and a celebration of unruly femininity, and it operates through a combination of dark glamour, humour, and expressive painterly confidence. Across series and individual works, she interrogates the social roles imposed on women and the performances demanded of them, using the portrait format as a space for resistance and self-determination.
Halls has participated in the BP Portrait Award at the National Portrait Gallery on multiple occasions and has exhibited with the Royal Society of Portrait Painters at Mall Galleries, London. She has received several awards including the Elizabeth Greenshields Foundation Award (2001), the Founder's Purchase Prize at the Discerning Eye (2010), and the Derwent Special Award from the Society of Women Artists (2017). Her portraits have been commissioned by major institutions: the National Galleries of Scotland hold her portrait Horse McDonald, West Hertfordshire NHS Trust commissioned a portrait for their collection, and BBC Arts commissioned a series of portraits as part of their Portraits for Sitting project. Disney Studios commissioned and acquired her Stretching Room paintings for the production of the film Haunted Mansion, released in 2023, now held in the Disney Archive.
Her solo exhibition history spans over two decades, with presentations at the National Theatre, London (2009), Beaux Arts Gallery, Bath, Hayhill Gallery, London, Stephen Lacey Gallery, London, Reuben Colley Fine Art, Birmingham, gallery 46, London (2022), and Haus Kunst Mitte, Berlin (2023). Group exhibitions have taken her work to Turner Contemporary in Margate, Flowers Gallery in London, the Potteries Museum and Art Gallery, the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition, the Royal West Academy in Bristol, and venues in Vienna, Lisbon, Athens, Cologne, and New York. She has co-curated exhibitions with the InFems Art Collective, including Lost Girls at Flowers Gallery, London (2023), Funna Ha Ha at Maddox Gallery, London (2022), and No Reserve at Leicester Contemporary (2021). Her work has been featured in publications including Unlocking Women's Art: Pioneers, Visionaries and Radicals of Paint and on the cover of Ambition Monster by Jennifer Romolini. KORNFELD Galerie Berlin presented Roxana Halls in the group exhibition Popcorn and Pickles at 69salon by KORNFELD, Berlin, in 2026.
