In Gilded Hosts, Danielle Fretwell turns the decadence of Les Dîners de Gala into a meditation on desire and restraint. A luminous still life—silver bowls, ripe fruit, and polished tableware—rests beneath a painted veil that transforms the scene into something quietly mysterious.

Fretwell’s practice centers on the tension between revelation and concealment. Her painted veils—applied using pressed fabric and bodily pressure—distill moments of opulence into layered fields of ambiguity. The result is a composition that withholds as much as it offers, inviting a slower, more contemplative form of looking.