In 2023, Dexi had finished five or six paintings in her Princess series and was looking for what came next.
She has always been drawn to the European courts of centuries past: the silhouettes, the ornament, the sheer amount of effort people once put into looking magnificent. One night she started watching Queen Charlotte: A Bridgerton Story on Netflix. Scene after scene, the young queen appeared in enormous wigs, woven high, decorated, and different every time.
Dexi immediately started work on the first painting, the Bead Hair Girl, and the others quickly followed
The wigs in the series are exaggerated, but not by as much as you'd think. In the late 1700s, fashionable women at court wore their hair built up over frames and pads, sometimes more than a foot high, decorated with flowers, feathers, ribbons, jewels, and occasionally entire miniature scenes. The style was called the pouf, and Marie Antoinette made it famous.
Dexi took that idea and made it her own. Ten paintings followed. In each one, the hair isn't a hairstyle so much as the whole composition: flowers, geometric patterns, and bright color built up the way a textile designer builds a print. That's no accident. Before she painted, Dexi spent decades in fashion and interior design in Caracas, and you can see it in how the patterns are layered.
Each portrait is a different girl, with a different crown of hair.
Explore all portraits in The Decorative Hair Collection