The city dismantled: mirages of and meditations on London in the work of contemporary artist Dali Schonfelder
By Georgia Shelley
“When I paint, I come to appreciate and make sense of the world we live in. I enter each work with a loose concept of how it will turn out. However, as I begin the actual process of painting, I find myself moving in new directions, entering further into the substratum, the hidden dimensions of our urban terrain, whether that be the complex mathematical and engineering structures that physically enable our built world to exist, or the architectural styles and references bound-up with its design. I suppose my paintings are gateways to this deeper understanding and appreciation of the physical setting we share.”
-Dali Schonfelder, interview with author, September 2026
London occupies a unique place in the global collective imagination. The setting of some nine million people’s lives, the city has come to be understood as a concept, possessing an identity in and of itself. Exceeding Hobbes’ vision of the Leviathan (where the state, or in this case the city, functions as a sum of its inhabitants), London as a city-subject operates as an active agent in shaping the lives of those who call it home. For visitors, a pre-established idea of the city and its associated personalities looms large. Images of sipping tea in trench coats, or red-lacquer double-decker buses passing by immaculate, impossibly identical Georgian townhouses saturate the city’s identity, disseminated by mass media and popular culture.
And yet, there is a remarkable divorce between the rigid conception of London as effortlessly glamorous and eternally postcard-ready, and the true diversity of daily encounters by those calling the city home, such as Dutch-Australian artist Dali Schonfelder. Predominantly raised in Indonesia and trained at the Parsons School of Design in New York, Schonfelder’s identity as an immigrant is at the core of her work. Each of her paintings seek to make sense of this magnanimous city, charting her continual process of re-cognition and discovery.
As Michel de Certeau maps out in The Practice of Everyday Life, the typical detached view of London as a measurable and, therefore, understandable identity homogenises and eclipses the individual, irreducible experiences of city dwellers. This results in an abstracted vision of the city whose attempt at universality becomes isolated from real, lived experiences.
A tangible example of this generalization of London is seen in the folding-maps carried by tourists. A ubiquitous symbol of unfamiliarity, the handheld map carries promise of objective understanding and, to an extent, conquest over a new spatial experience. Every street, every monument, every designated ‘must see’ place is made visible and rendered in context to its surroundings. The city is presented as transparent; everything has shape and can be read and measured.
Interestingly, conceptualising London through the linear process of cartography encourages a detachment from organic, lived experiences of the city. As de Certeau explains, “the rationalisation of the city leads to its mythification.” Embodied encounters, where one traverses the city’s terrain and forms subjective and, importantly, only partial understandings, directly oppose the one-dimensional, almost larger-than-life characterisation of London.
Unlearning London’s assigned identity and reconciling it with complex, overlapping and at times competing experiences is an inevitable process for any first-time visitor. This experience has come to be known as ‘Paris Syndrome’, referencing stories of Japanese tourists facing extreme disappointment upon arrival in Paris. The sensation was so common and palpable it became a genuine condition. Considering London beyond the glamour of Zone 1 can similarly cause a real cognitive dissonance for newcomers.
For artists who move to the city in search of a historied artistic or international zeitgeist, they too must reconcile with the realities of living in a bifurcated city. As the cost of living continues to soar and more artists are pushed out, grassroots networks and support structures proliferate. The community that grows both out of, and in reaction to, London as a deified ‘cultural center’ attests to its ever evolving and non-distillable identities.
This is a reality Schonfelder grapples with across her work. Iconic, canonised images of the city, from Elizabeth Tower to St Paul’s Cathedral, are systematically pulled apart and re-assembled in her creative process.
For Schonfelder, painting is central to her cultural adjustment. In devoting time and attention to de- and re-constructing these monuments, often through the mathematical and architectural structures which underpin them, she internalises their complexity beyond her previous surface-level experience. The act of painting, which interlaces the body, the mind and the eye, becomes a mechanism for confronting the novel physical and visual realities of this new place. Schonfelder’s painted canvases are not merely documents of her mental processing, but active tools in producing this very adjustment for beholders.
Each of Schonfelder’s surfaces, with their brightly coloured monuments gesturally rendered against a chalkboard background, pay clear homage to the New York and London Pop Art schools of the 1950s and 60s. In this vein, her works draw on a tradition of irreverently reconciling with city urbanism. The artist’s architectural subjects also evoke the classroom, as she fashions herself as a “student of London,” peeling back layers of memory and cultural narratives that have become affixed to buildings’ identities.
Recently, Schonfelder’s work has become increasingly musical, meditating on the auditory dimension of music as intertwined with London’s perceived identity. In Something Something (2026), she re-constructs the Beatles’ venerated 1969 album cover for Abbey Road, in which all four members cross a zebra crossing in Maida Vale. Schonfelder’s raised perspective and somewhat geometric rendering of the scene adopts the perspective of an outsider looking in, whilst her frantic diagrams and mathematical equations, entwined with Beatles’ lyrics like “Little Darling,” signals her attempts to understand the multitude of dimensions London has come to represent, whether that be visual or musical.
Each architectural portrait exists in what Schonfelder regards as a “deliberately unfinished” state, with its layers of painting and mathematical scribbles spilling from the confines of colour fields. In doing so, Schonfelder presents a conception of urban London not as a pristine, coherent and homogenous city, but rather a landscape comprised of partial, fragmented and inherently embodied encounters. The visibility of each layer of paint echoes the construction of each building and thus their associated and inherited social value. In Schonfelder’s work, she retains the experience of discovery championed by Michel de Certeau, as the on-looker glimpses their own grapplings of this magnanimous, multifarious and ever-evolving city.
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Dali Schonfelder is represented by the Rebecca Hossack Art Gallery, London.
