Scroll is pleased to present Performance Cancelled, a presentation of new works by Adèle Aproh, opening Friday, March 20 from 6-8pm at 291 Grand Street. This is the artist’s second solo exhibition with the gallery.

In her new body of work, Aproh brings together scenes of preparation for a performance that never takes place, looking at each moment of what happens beforehand. Her figures are drawn in the process of transformation – getting dressed, applying makeup, adjusting a corset, lacing up a slipper. Amidst a flurry of activity and stages of undress, it is never entirely clear what the girls are preparing for. The various settings – bar, dressing room, hair salon – remain deliberately ambiguous, serving as transitional spaces, neither fully public nor intimate, where identity is still being constructed. Aproh is drawn less to the event itself and more to the fleeting moment that comes just before it comes into being.

Aproh uses clothing as a tool for transformation and for structure. The corset appears repeatedly across her compositions, creating a visible tension to hold, straighten, and impose posture. In Tight, this idea becomes literal. French author Hervé Bazin’s phrase, “Discipline is a safer corset than good will” (« La discipline est un corset plus sûr que la bonne volonté »), resonates directly with this work, and more broadly, with the entirety of Performance Cancelled. Control operates through constraint, and the silhouette is shaped through compression. Aproh also spends time poring over fashion and runway archives at the Bibliothèque des Arts Décoratifs. The images she unearths inform the way she thinks about posture, clothing, and the staging of the body. The runway is a highly codified, almost theatrical space. In Aproh’s drawings, that theatricality is displaced to the moment before the entrance – when the role is still in flux.

Comics and graphic novels also influence the way Aproh composes her work, developing into highly personal and narrative, even if that narrative is not immediately legible. Certain works also enter into dialogue with specific images. Night Shift (I & II) draw inspiration from a still of Wes Anderson’s Moonrise Kingdom, though the perspective is reversed: the scene is viewed from behind the mirror. In Line at the Hairdresser, the composition echoes Kerry James Marshall’s iconic barbershop painting, De Style (1993, Los Angeles County Museum of Art), while the white-clad figure in the foreground refers to Pablo Picasso’s Portrait of Paulo as Pierrot (1929, private collection).

Performance Cancelled speaks about women’s bodies, their femininity, and therefore, the artist’s own. The bodies are sometimes nude, but they are not intended to be eroticized or fetishized. The gaze directed at them is internal and close, less about seduction than about showing a state, a tension, and a presence.

This new body of work also marks a shift in scale within Aproh’s practice. Working in her largest scale to date, Aproh is able to unfold more detail and allow multiple tensions to coexist within a single composition. She works slow, and over long periods of time, allowing her colored pencil and pastel drawings to develop in layers, sometimes drifting away from the initial idea. The insistence of the gesture, the meticulousness, and sometimes even a form of exhaustion, settle into the surface of each work. Micro-scenes coexist within each composition, smaller details open up possibilities of exploration and new narratives. The eye moves, lingers, and wanders across each expansive sheet of paper, and each viewer is free to construct their own interpretation.

Aproh states, “The performance suggested by the title never happens. It remains suspended. What becomes visible instead is the work that precedes it: the contained tension, the act of construction. The backstage takes center stage. If there is a spectacle, it exists precisely there.”

Adèle Aproh (b. 1996) currently lives and works in Paris, France. She has exhibited with MXM Galeria, Madrid; IRL Gallery, New York; The Hole, New York; ATLA, Los Angeles; Saatchi Gallery, London; Moosey Art, London; Delphia Gallery, Charantes; MIMA Museum, Brussels, among others. Aproh was the Innovate Grant Summer Recipient in 2023, and participated in the Mack Art Foundation residency in 2025. Her work has been published in Harper’s Magazine, ArtMaze Magazine, Booooooom, The Drawing Stall, Civil Art Publishing, Odalïsque Magazine, Doxy Magazine, among others. Aproh is represented by Scroll.