She Paints Still is a dual-venue exhibition initiated by two London-based female gallerists, inviting audiences into the ongoing worlds of two female artists.
Presented simultaneously at Tiderip and Mandy Zhang Art, the exhibition brings together works by Alexandra Baraitser and YU Xiao from different series and periods, highlighting both their conceptual and medium divergences while staging a dialogue across spaces.
At Tiderip, Baraitser’s early paintings revisit classic design and interior spaces, revealing her meticulous reconstructions of design objects and her ordered approach to their representation. In dialogue, YU Xiao’s Da Vinci Mirror series is a quiet excavation of perception, perspective, and the fragile crossroads of reality and abstraction, tangled, too, with Helene Cixous’s écriture féminine. It lingers in the fluidity of representation: images that refuse to fix, shifting like thought itself, all to trace the unspoken currents of female experience.
Mandy Zhang Art presents Baraitser’s more recent works, in which her focus shifts from individual design objects to modernist spaces as a whole such as hotel lobbies, courtyards, and architectural façades, capturing a detached yet introspective perspective. YU Xiao’s Utopian Blink series, by contrast, orbits the notion of the "non-place". A realm of potential beyond tangible reality, where "blink" acts as both a lens and a spark: a primal, curious way of seeing that jolts attention awake.
Through this interwoven arrangement of spaces and series, She Paints Still invites audiences to consider how female artistic practice endures through persistence in the face of cultural and structural challenges, the multiplicity of cross-cultural identities, and the temporal flows embedded in artistic production. The exhibition challenges the idea of interruption, showing how female artists sustain painting as a vital and enduring form of expression amid shifting lives and cultural contexts.
