Eileen Cooper's new paintings focus on women 'getting ready' in private and intimate spaces

The works expand on themes Cooper has explored throughout her forty-year career, those of universal female experience, primarily fertility, sexuality and motherhood. This time, she considers the rhythms and rituals of "getting ready". Those intimate and sometimes simple acts like brushing or washing hair or applying make-up.

Other paintings celebrate female friendship, sisterhood and sense of self. All of the subjects appear confident, gazing stridently out at the viewer or at their own figures in the multitude of mirrors that populate the paintings.

Although not strictly representational, this latest series comes after an intensive year of drawing from life, a marked change in the artist’s process, and after a lifetime of working directly from imagination. Cooper has skilfully blended this new part of her practice with her characteristic use of graphic, decisive line, flattened space and bold colour palette.

"As one of the country’s most influential female painters, Cooper has been a force in the British art world for many years and I am very pleased to announce our first exhibition together," says Giles Huxley-Parlour, gallery director. "In these joyous, strongly graphic pictures is encased the spirit of an artist determined to work at the highest levels of artistic dexterity, but also to produce work that speaks to us all of the universal human experience that she so voraciously absorbs. It is a powerful and compelling combination."

Personal Space by Eileen Cooper RA will be presented in a major solo exhibition at Huxley-Parlour Gallery in London, launching on 16 October.