When the English artist Somaya Critchlow was at art school around a decade ago, she once showed a tutor a painting she had made of her cousins sitting on a sofa. When the teacher likened it to the glam-realist style of David Hockney, Critchlow was taken aback.

“This sucks,” she recalled thinking. “That’s not what I want to paint.”

Critchlow was developing a deep affinity for the naked form at the time. But that felt at odds with everything she was learning at art school about conceptual art, and everything her feminist mother had taught her about female objectification.

For Critchlow, 31, the shift that happened when modernism took over as the dominant form of artistic expression never resonated. She likes her paintings old — Renaissance era, to be specific. Even Matisse’s poetic “Blue Nudes” series, for example, is not her cup of tea. (“No disrespect to Matisse,” she said.)

This is perhaps why Dulwich Picture Gallery, a London museum known for its collection of over 600 old master paintings, is the perfect place for Critchlow’s debut at a major British institution. Her exhibition, “The Chamber,” running through July 20, is part of the museum’s “Unlocking Painting” program, which puts contemporary painters in dialogue with the works it owns.

Lucy West, a Dulwich Picture Gallery curator who worked on Critchlow’s show, said, “Somaya had so many factors that made her the perfect fit. She grew up close to Dulwich Picture Gallery, so she was a regular visitor as a child. Also, she is a painter who has been endlessly fascinated by the old masters.”