Emma Fineman
Encounters
April 2022
Huxley-Parlour Gallery
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Huxley-Parlour is pleased to present Encounters, an exhibition of new work by London-based artist, Emma Fineman. Encounters consists of work across three mediums: painting, sculpture, and
monoprint, and will be Fineman’s first solo show at Huxley-Parlour.
The title, Encounters, refers to a modern hierarchy of images in which ideas of space, communication,
and touch - both physical and metaphorical - are contested. Speaking about her work, Fineman
says: ‘I am most interested in the gaps and the slippages, places where things don’t always align and
that often encourage longer looking.’
Encounters engages with theory on the post-internet age. Fineman’s practice maintains painterly,
fleshy tones, while insistently prodding the effects of culture, industry, and speed on the collective
unconscious. Spanning sublime Renaissance composition, epic classical form, and twentiethcentury figuration, Encounters is an index of references, deconstructing art history along the
postmodern vectors of centre and periphery.
Painted with gentle majesty, Emma Fineman presents five new paintings and one monoprint whose
compositions recall the transcendent and religiously inflected canvases of William Blake, opposing
the terrestrial and celestial, the known and the unknown. Her heavily wrought, impasto brushstrokes
imbue the works with a strong haptic presence, inviting allegorical reading.
Significantly, Encounters will continue Fineman’s exploration of painterly space with Peripheral
Visions - a frieze whose sheer size forces the viewer to consider the artist’s marshaling of the picture
frame, and the viewer’s own relationship to pictorial space. This painting is formative, and has a
gravity around which the central themes of the show coalesce. The artist states: ‘The peripheral
space is one where things are felt, and are instinctive, a fixated viewpoint becomes unnecessary in
order to perceive and to understand’.
Encounters will also be the first time Fineman exhibits sculpture in the UK with two new bronzes
- The Exchange and Temporal Reaching - the first of which uses form to consider connection,
communication, and understanding across a symbolic divide.
In situ
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Installation: Emma Fineman, Encounters.
Extract ---
Huxley-Parlour is pleased to present Encounters, an exhibition of new work by London-based artist, Emma Fineman. Encounters consists of work across three mediums: painting, sculpture, and monoprint, and will be Fineman’s first solo show at Huxley-Parlour.
The title, Encounters, refers to a modern hierarchy of images in which ideas of space, communication, and touch - both physical and metaphorical - are contested. Speaking about her work, Fineman says: ‘I am most interested in the gaps and the slippages, places where things don’t always align and that often encourage longer looking.’
Encounters engages with theory on the post-internet age. Fineman’s practice maintains painterly, fleshy tones, while insistently prodding the effects of culture, industry, and speed on the collective unconscious. Spanning sublime Renaissance composition, epic classical form, and twentiethcentury figuration, Encounters is an index of references, deconstructing art history along the postmodern vectors of centre and periphery.
Painted with gentle majesty, Emma Fineman presents five new paintings and one monoprint whose compositions recall the transcendent and religiously inflected canvases of William Blake, opposing the terrestrial and celestial, the known and the unknown. Her heavily wrought, impasto brushstrokes imbue the works with a strong haptic presence, inviting allegorical reading.
Significantly, Encounters will continue Fineman’s exploration of painterly space with Peripheral Visions - a frieze whose sheer size forces the viewer to consider the artist’s marshaling of the picture frame, and the viewer’s own relationship to pictorial space. This painting is formative, and has a gravity around which the central themes of the show coalesce. The artist states: ‘The peripheral space is one where things are felt, and are instinctive, a fixated viewpoint becomes unnecessary in order to perceive and to understand’.
Encounters will also be the first time Fineman exhibits sculpture in the UK with two new bronzes - The Exchange and Temporal Reaching - the first of which uses form to consider connection, communication, and understanding across a symbolic divide.
In situ
Installation: Emma Fineman, Encounters.