Ellie Rines Gallery is pleased to announce Mitford/Soong, a solo booth of new works by New York-based artist Cynthia Talmadge (b.1989, New York, NY) on view at Frieze London (October 14 - 18).

Mitford/Soong is an immersive booth installation that reimagines two dynasties of 20th-century socialite sisters who reshaped feminine power across the globe: the Mitfords of England and the Soongs of China. Amid the birth of modern global politics, these nine women wielded immense soft power, blurring the lines between geopolitical authority and domestic intimacy. Drawing from German Expressionist cinema (such as Dr. Mabuse) and early Chinese film, Talmadge weaves a hallucinatory, psychosexual horror narrative that connects these geographically distant women through supernatural phenomena like telepathic communication, body transference, and remote hypnosis. The exhibition focuses heavily on their early lives, mapping a dark continuum between eccentric upbringings, schoolgirl rivalries, and the ghoulish moral detachment that would later define their adulthoods.

Talmadge transforms the booth into a shared, theatrical study for the sisters, enveloped in custom, artist-designed narrative wallpaper. On the side walls, eight vertical trompe l'œil pinboard paintings (each measuring eight by four feet) function as psychological self-portraits assembled from the ephemera of their daily lives. The sisters' physical interventions upon one another's boards lay bare raw familial grievances and private jokes, such as a magazine cover featuring Nancy Mitford pinned in place, only to be defaced by Diana with a mocking cartoon mustache, collapsing affection and cruelty into a single gesture.

The back wall of the booth will include four additional pointilist paintings; executed in a dark, lurid palette of grainy, vignetted monochromes, these works mimic vintage film stills capturing formative moments from the Mitford and Soong childhoods. Through forced perspectives, hard shadows, and dramatic Dutch tilts, these paintings reinforce the project’s cinematic terror, utilizing seemingly trivial domestic details to construct a profound meditation on gender, soft power, and historical trauma. "Extremely Dangerous and Sinister Young Woman" expands upon Talmadge’s interest in German expressionism and futurism: a procession of limbs, fitted with heels and adorned with flapper-style dresses, fade in and out amidst an urban backdrop. Like the early chronophotography of Marey and Muybridge, the transparent repetition of legs mimics the technique of multiple exposure, capturing the mechanics of human dynamics floating through the solidity of a single plate. Altogether, Mitford/Soong realizes an imaginative through line not just between two dynastic groups of powerful families, and their intimacies, but also between different movements and aesthetic histories.