Kristin Hjellegjerde Gallery's West Palm Beach space has opened Soft Bodies, Hard Frames, the first solo exhibition in the United States by Welsh artist Darcy Whent. The show runs from 18 September to 24 October 2026, with a private view held on 17 September. Whent grew up in rural Wales and spent her childhood longing for city life. Painting became both an escape and a way of working through complex psychological experience without needing to arrive at a resolution. Her compositions tend to open up more questions than they answer, inviting the viewer to hold several contradictory readings at once. The works weave personal memory together with folklore and women's histories. In one painting a woman balances one-footed on top of a pearlescent egg, her black hair rippling down behind her and unfurling into wallpaper-like patterns of painted leaves, branches for black birds. The resulting scenes sit in an uneasy register between seduction and menace, pleasure and pain — seductive in their detail, unsettling in their logic. At stake is how inherited narratives shape not only a sense of self but wider systems of belief. Whent is interested in how stories get built and interpreted, and in what allows one version of events to acquire authority while others are set aside. The exhibition is on view at the gallery's West Palm Beach space at 2414 Florida Avenue, following a private view on 17 September. Across the hang, Whent draws the viewer into a fantastical world of hybrid spaces and characters — painted environments where inherited stories are taken apart and examined, and where no single narrative is permitted to settle as the authoritative one.