Emma Fineman: REALMS OF THE (UN) REAL

PUBLIC Gallery is proud to present REALMS OF THE (UN) REAL, a solo exhibition of new works by Emma Fineman. The works featured in the exhibition explore various realms of ontological space, be they physical, remembered, eternal, dream-like or fetishistic; all existing within a world void of temporal constraints.

Anchored around an expansive horizontal triptych in the centre of the gallery, Fineman’s creations hang scattered on either side, revealing intimate windows into the artists mind - reoccurring dreams, fetishized desires and vast imagined psychological spaces. Within these fantastical settings the figures, for the most part self-portraits, are rendered as dwindling visages neither present nor absent, seemingly at the intersection of existence.

Fineman’s works explore methods to fracture and reconfigure pictorial space, as a means to describe and digest the dense compression and spacialization of time in contemporary culture. In our moment, we are inundated with visual information that renders our ability to understand and process experience, as well as our sense of time and perspective, haphazard if not indeed skewed. Fineman’s works contemplate what happens to narrative under such conditions and examines the possibilities of figurative painting to both extend and compress descriptive time within this framework.

The exhibition’s title alludes to The Story of the Vivian Girls, in What Is Known as the Realms of the Unreal, of the Glandeco-Angelinian War Storm, Caused by the Child Slave Rebellion, a multi-volume fantasy manuscript and body of illustrations produced over several decades by the reclusive artist Henry Darger (1892-1973). Like Darger, Fineman’s sources lay deep in her memory and in that unknowable region of the psyche where yearning, aspiration and an expressive impulse reside. However, Fineman’s paintings go beyond pure fantasy, instead depicting realms of eternity that blur our traditional conceptions of what is real and unreal, mirroring our increasingly distorted experience of contemporary life.

Belonging to a realm unto themselves, Fineman’s paintings become a space to contemplate and to reflect. Her internal desires are played out in a series of expressive and gestural marks that sit somewhere between drawing and painting; somewhere between the quick note to jot down an idea, and a more prolonged meditation on the parts of daily life that for some unknowable reason affix themselves to back of one’s mind and kick about with an unnerving permanence.

Emma Fineman (b. 1991, Berkeley, California), lives and works in London. In 2018 she graduated with an MA in Painting from the Royal College of Art, London, and graduated Magna Cum Laude with a BFA in Painting from Maryland Institute of Art in 2013. Among other awards Fineman was a finalist of the ‘John Moores Painting Prize’ hosted at The Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool (2018) and was selected as one of the ‘Bloomberg New Contemporaries’ exhibiting at The South London Gallery (2018). Other notable exhibitions include: ‘FBA Futures’, Federation of British Artists, London (2019), ‘SURGE’, East Wing Biennial 13, Somerset House, London (2018) and ‘RBA Rising Stars’, Framers Gallery, London (2018). Upcoming exhibitions include a solo show at BEERS London (2019).