Hadassah Emmerich
’Creole Collidoscope’
07.09.2024 — 06.10.2024
PLUS-ONE Gallery presents the first solo exhibition by Hadassah Emmerich at the gallery (New South).
Hadassah Emmerich is regarded as one of today’s most important Dutch painters. She makes exuberant, sensual paintings that stimulate the senses. Her creative process has a cyclic character, in which shapes and patterns keep recurring in a different composition or context, so that her works are in continual dialogue with one another. Emmerich thus spins an ever bigger and denser web of themes and associations. Her long, laborious creative process demands great physical and mental effort and concentration, which lends extra overtones and meanings to each detail. The ensuing monumental and generous works have a profound effect on the viewer and can evoke feelings of ecstasy. The power of fusing is a central feature of Emmerich’s oeuvre. In her work, she mixes together figures and patterns of flowers, plants and the female body, resulting in ornaments with an erotic appearance. The alluring images clearly refer to a fundamental life force and fertility, which are essential to both nature and mankind.
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Hadassah Emmerich NL, b. 1974
The hybrid character of Emmerich's paintings is not restricted to the method of their making. It reflects her background as a Dutch woman of Southeast Asian heritage with Chinese and German roots. Mingling references appropriated, unfolded, and processed throughout her career, Hadassah Emmerich includes allusions to her upbringing in the work. These presences go from the batik technique, whose principle she could be seen to use in reverse through the imprinting method, to the silhouettes of Wayang, the traditional Indonesian shadow theatre, whose essence is distantly recalled as shapes in movement.The kaleidoscope of Hadassah Emmerich's paintings suggests lustful profusions that engage the outlines of tropical flowers, fruits and plants while insinuating bodily parts and erotic elements. The appeal to the logic of resemblance and approximations in these works allows reflections, diffractions and distortions as welcomed deviations, forms of visual dissent. When put in relation, elements that wouldn't typically be perceived as belonging to the same context snap together, sparking zones of confrontation and pleasure.
Important recent exhibitions by Emmerich includes: Solo booth Art Brussel 2024 in collaboration with Galerie Ron Mandos (NL); ‘Epicurean Eden’, EMST Athens, GR (2024); ‘False Flat’ at Bonnefanten Museum Maastricht, NL (2022 – 2023); ‘Hips Don't Lie’ at BE-PART, Waregem, BE (2022); ‘Abrasive Paradise’, Kunsthal KadE, Amersfoort, NL (2022); ‘BXL UNIVERSEL II : Multipli.city’, CENTRALE for Contemporary Art, Brussels, BE (2021); ‘The Great Ephemeral Skin’, De Garage, Mechelen, BE (2019). Works by Hadassah Emmerich are included in various private en public collections like the ING Collection (NL).
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Exhibition: 07.09.2024 — 06.10.2024
Opening: Saturday 07.09.2024
from 1pm — 6pm
General opening hours:
Wednesday — Saturday: 1pm - 6pm
PLUS-ONE Gallery
Léon Stynenstraat 21
2000 Antwerp (BE)
