Artist to Watch: Danielle Fretwell Puts a Modern Twist on 17th Century-Style Dutch Paintings

Expertly rendered still lifes of ripe fruits, whole fish served on a silver dish, and a sparkling crystal goblet full of berry-red wine, all arrayed on luxuriously draped fabric, might seem like the epitome of 17th-century Dutch painting; but artist Danielle Fretwell presents a beguiling, 21st-century twist on the genre. In this age of image oversaturation, she hides parts of these time-honored compositions behind a theatrical veil or plunges them into darkness with the aim, she explains, of “creating spaces that are a little bit difficult for the viewer to enter.”

“My practice is always guided around this idea of truth,” she adds. “It’s really this ongoing sense of anxiety because of what’s going on in the world and this constant access to information or misinformation. It’s put on us, as the user of media, to discern what is real, what should be trusted.”

The inherent paradoxes of her practice—slow and fast, mimetic and abstract, meticulous and left to chance—give the canvases their energy and mystery. Fretwell hit upon the concept during grad school at Boston University. She had gravitated toward the opulence of Dutch Old Masters but felt the need to justify painting in the centuries-old style. “I was really struggling to find my place within contemporary art,” she says. Then a college printmaking class gave her a eureka moment.

As demonstrated in her “Split Still Lifes” series, Fretwell divides the canvas into sections, then paints the scene primarily from the photographs she takes of it. Next, using thinned oil paint, she presses a bed sheet onto the part of the canvas she wants to obscure. “When I lift it up, the texture is left behind,” says Fretwell, who is preparing to make her New York solo debut in June, at Olney Gleason gallery. “The still life section is developed slowly and carefully, painted with a certain precision. The veil is immediate, done quickly, as I leave it up to chance on how the print will look once the sheet is peeled off. The printmaking is where it becomes physical as I am crawling to press the sheet into the surface.”

Fretwell also sees herself as a party host, shopping for beautiful produce and hunting for the perfect tableware at thrift and antiques stores. “It’s almost like I am preparing these meals,” she says, “but it’s only experienced through the painting.”

A version of this article first appeared in print in our 2026 Summer Issue in the section “Artists to Watch.” Subscribe to the magazine.