Soup presents the gallery’s nineteenth exhibition, Holly Keogh’s debut UK solo exhibition ‘Bang Bang Bang On The Door Baby!’. Keogh (b.1991, North Carolina) is an American painter living and working in London. She graduated with an MA in Fine Art from Goldsmiths in 2025, having previously completed her undergraduate studies in Fine Art and Art History from UNC-Charlotte.

Keogh’s paintings explore how glamour can be used as a power structure to shape, commodify and contain femininity; how the increasingly blurred boundaries between public and private leads to a conflation of personal and collective memory; how the maintenance of a perpetual online presence inflates and obscures anxieties or vulnerabilities; and how the need to desire and be desired ultimately overpowers all of the above. Incorporating imagery from family photographs, art historical or pop-cultural allegories and her own lived experience, Keogh’s staged compositions both materially and conceptually engage with the distinctions between permanence and ephemerality – as realistic renderings in a saturated palette hold space for final, fleeting, figurative depictions added using a precarious, relief-based printing process.

For her onomatopoeically titled debut London solo exhibition, Keogh takes inspiration from the outdated and outmoded interiors collected and catalogued in books from the late 70s to early 80s. Hollow homes captured with harsh flash photography, depicting domestic environments seemingly devoid of the human touch, pristine yet peculiar, homesteads transformed into psychologically charged sites of supposed expectation. Here, pre-plumped pillows, flamboyant water features, ornately patterned wallpapers and stained dark-wood stairwells are overlaid with figures and faces sourced from self-help guides to discerning your seasonal colour palette and practical ‘How To’ handbooks for lace making or wine tasting. Employing a monotype printing process developed over the past several years, Keogh paints onto sheets of upholstery foam, their spongy surface absorbing the liquid acrylic pigment before being pressed onto the canvas composition, transferring image to ghostly imprint.

A projection of the imagined ideal perhaps, as each spectral, ephemeral addition enforces the aspiration that you too could reside within such a well appointed space, primed and prepared for entertaining guests or hosting out-of-towners. Elsewhere, these printed adornments recur and repeat across the surface of the painting, slowly fading and degrading, blurring in a manner reminiscent of movement interrupting a long exposure photograph. Additionally, a gridded construction of smaller works produced solely using the aforementioned relief-printing process serves as a storyboard of close-up crops, documenting the signifiers and accessories of a certain suburban wealth. On closer inspection, however, a bandaged hand extended to offer a glass of bubbly or a red-eyed bunny held in a tight embrace expose sinister, surreal undertones, as cracks inevitably begin to show in the superficial charade.