Esiri Erheriene-Essi & Hadassah Emmerich at Stedelijk Museum Schiedam
Galerie Ron Mandos is pleased to share that Esiri Erheriene-Essi and Hadassah Emmerich are featured in the group exhibition Broodnodig. Van land, naar keuken en tafel at Stedelijk Museum Schiedam, on view from October 10, 2026, through March 14, 2027.
Broodnodig looks at how food connects us to land, labour, rituals and memory. Curated by Rawad Baaklini with researcher Lieneke Hulshof, the exhibition brings together more than seventy works by fifty artists, from Rembrandt, Pieter Bruegel the Elder and Piet Mondriaan to contemporary artists such as Sophie Calle, Camille Henrot and Mika Rottenberg. The works are arranged in three chapters, Land, Kitchen and Table, and show how food is tied up with power, migration, care and cultural identity.
The exhibition began in kitchens and around tables. Before any works were chosen, eight chefs from different cultural and professional backgrounds met with the curators to talk about what food and cooking mean to them. These conversations formed the basis for the exhibition and the selection of works.
Broodnodig. Van land, naar keuken en tafel
October 10, 2026 – March 14, 2027
Stedelijk Museum Schiedam
ABOUT Esiri Erheriene-Essi
Born in 1982 in London, United Kingdom
Lives and works in Amsterdam, The Netherlands
Esiri Erheriene-Essi is predominately a painter of mid to large-scale paintings concerned with figuration, history and society. She is captivated by history – in particular, images, objects, and documents which we can return to, in order to examine both individual and shared memories and histories. A large part of her practice entails collecting and creating an archive, which could potentially become incorporated into her work. Archives are important to the artist as they create links and orders that she can question and play with – she searches for the discrepancies, the silences, in order to, through painting, create interruptions and assaults on the canonical historical narrative. With hindsight, bias and curiosity, she takes these discordances and brings them up to the surface. Erheriene-Essi continuously re-edits the narratives with the hope of robbing history of some of its tyrannical power by creating new scenarios. Or rather, she is incessantly attempting to imagine more humane and liberating narratives than what has gone before. In the process she perhaps slightly changes our readings of history and thereby shows how we write the present.
In her work, Erheriene-Essi makes many references to popular culture, because popular culture is profoundly mythic and loaded. The canvases she makes are a theatre of popular desires and fantasies, where we all can discover and play with the process of identification. These ‘theatrical scenes’ show the imagined as well as the underrepresented, not only to the viewer but also to the artist herself. The paintings ‘play’ in their own way – they are telling a story, even though the scenes have no beginning, middle or end – they are cut off mid flow, out of context, are frozen, silent and still. Yet they have ‘sound’ as if they are performing and want to be heard. The audience is continuously invited to watch as well as to try and decipher the haphazard plot in which characters are encased in. The good thing about performing on canvas is that anything is possible – and that is what intrigues Erheriene-Essi the most.
ABOUT Hadassah Emmerich
Hadassah Emmerich was born in 1974, in the Netherlands
She lives and works in Brussels, Belgium
Hadassah Emmerich explores recurring themes like the body and identity, the sensory and the sensual, the commodification of the erotic and the exotic. The sensuality of her painting resides not only on the surface of the erotic image, but also in her refined use of colour and technical execution. Since 2016, Emmerich has worked with a new painting technique, using stencils cut from vinyl flooring, which she covers with ink and then impresses onto canvas, paper or a wall. Referring to the visual language of advertising and Pop art, she creates images that both aestheticise and problematize the female body. She depicts the paradox of simultaneous attraction and repulsion, intimacy and cool detachment, seduction and critique. In this way, Emmerich succeeds in making the act of looking truly provocative.
Hadassah Emmerich studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in Maastricht, HISK Flanders and Goldsmiths College, London. She had exhibitions at Bonnefanten, Maastricht, NL; Kunsthal Kade, Amersfoort, NL; The Royal Palace, Amsterdam, NL; CENTRALE for contemporary art, Brussels, BE; ISA Art Gallery, Jakarta, ID; De Garage, Mechelen BE; KANAL, Brussels, BE; Museum Arnhem, NL; GEM, The Hague, NL; Künstlerhaus Bethanien, Berlin, DE; SCHUNCK, Heerlen, NL. Her work is represented in the collections of a.o. Museum Voorlinden, Wassenaar; Federal Government, Brussels; Rijksmuseum Amsterdam; Bonnefanten, Maastricht; Flemish Parliament, Brussels; Kunstmuseum Den Haag; Museum Arnhem, and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, The Hague.
