Isabelle du Toit

Dallas, TX—Cris Worley is proud to announce a new exhibition of oil paintings by Isabelle du Toit, entitled Vivarium. This year marks the 25th year that Worley and du Toit have worked together. There will be an opening reception on Thursday, September 10, from 5 to 7 p.m. The exhibition will be on view through October 24.

In Vivarium, Isabelle du Toit creates an imagined world in which animals, insects, and other living creatures become stand-ins for larger questions about difference, belonging, vulnerability, and coexistence. The exhibition takes its title from the Latin vivus, meaning “alive,” and from the enclosed environments designed to sustain and observe living things. For du Toit, the vivarium becomes both a metaphor and a point of departure: a contained world in which diverse forms of life exist alongside one another, each dependent on conditions that can be easily altered or disrupted.

Rendered with extraordinary precision in oil, du Toit’s birds, mammals, and insects emerge from deep, often stark fields of color. Her characteristic attention to the individual—every feather, hair, wing, and surface carefully observed—gives her subjects a heightened presence. At the same time, the theatrical isolation of these creatures creates a sense of fragility and exposure. They are beautiful and self-contained, yet never entirely free from the possibility of human’s encroachment.

Having lived between countries and cultures, du Toit brings a personal understanding of what it means to exist both inside and outside a particular place. In Vivarium, she considers belonging not as a matter of sameness, but as the possibility of difference existing without exclusion. By looking at the human world through the lives of animals, she quietly questions our tendency to categorize, separate, and determine who (or what) belongs.