Emma Fineman:Encounters

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 twentieth-century 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.