The Studio of Hadassah Emmerich
Hadassah Emmerich

The Studio of Hadassah Emmerich

Welcome to the studio of Hadassah Emmerich. This is where she creates her lush, sensuous paintings and prepares the mural that she is going to create for her upcoming solo exhibition Botanical Body Bliss.

Emmerich has developed a unique artistic process: she cuts shapes from a piece of vinyl, paints them, and then prints them onto the canvas or the wall. The result is a visual language that is painterly, but which is simultaneously imbued with a mechanical and distant character. As a result, the work is an interplay of a variety of factors, a position with which Hadassah identifies because of her culturally diverse background.

Jack of Hearts II, 2022 | Acrylic and oil on canvas | 220 x 140 cm

Hadassah Emmerich

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A Short Background

The fusion of flowers, plants and body parts; the amalgamation of forms and colors takes center stage in Emmerich’s work. Other important themes covered by the artist are exoticism, eroticism and cultural exchange: how we project these onto tropical fruits, plants and bodies, and how this gaze is intertwined with desire and commodification. Emmerich’s interest in these topics is a result of her mixed heritage of Dutch, Indonesian, Chinese and German, as well as a sense of being different while growing up in a small town in the Dutch province of Limburg. Now, Emmerich has been living in Brussels for seven years and everything falls into place. The multilayered and international character of the city is an ongoing source of fascination and visual inspiration for Emmerich, which resonates in her new works.

Painting with stencils

Emmerich builds up her paintings and murals by applying paint on hand-cut vinyl stencils and then printing them. The use of stencils not only allows her to construct the painting beforehand but also makes it possible to create different versions of a similar composition through reprinting the stencils in various color combinations. Emmerich is interested in how colors are culturally defined, and how a work is interpreted in a different way if it is made with so called ‘warm’ or ‘cold’ colors.

Enamel, 2022 | Oil and printing ink on vinyl | 60,2 x 77,7

Hadassah Emmerich

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Collages

Recently, Emmerich has started to collect and re-use the stencils of earlier works and murals to create vinyl collages. The used stencils resemble different kinds of leather and sometimes bear traces of the printing process, such as scratches and scrapes. The collages allow Emmerich’s creative process to become ‘full circle’: motives, shapes and patterns are constantly recurring in a different composition or context in a cyclical character.

Poires Belle Hélène, 2019 | Oil on canvas | 145 x 105

Hadassah Emmerich

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Lover's Rock, 2019 | Oil and printing ink on vinyl | 60,2 x 77,7 (framed)

Hadassah Emmerich

Available

Murals

Emmerich’s murals are usually large-scale. Motives and references are blown up to monumental proportions, allowing for an immersive and visceral experience. To execute her paintings on such large dimensions, it has become a necessity to create a mural design beforehand. Like creating a collage, she assembles different forms and colors on her computer to create a new composition. She calculates the sizes of each stencil and decides which colors will be applied.  The stencils for the actual work are prepared in the studio, and then transported to the space to be painted and printed on site.

“I hope that the visitor will be immersed in the experience as soon as they walk into the gallery. In fact, it’s a moving experience. At first glance, especially viewing the mural, you will see that the colors, the shapes, the rhythm and the movement will engage with one another. The scale is very relevant as often the painting will tower above the viewer. Then, the visitor will search for meaning, look for themes, and it will become clear that the gaze can travel freely from figurative references such as plants or body parts to abstract painterly spaces.” – Hadassah Emmerich

Hadassah Emmerich, Crashing Cymbals Caressing Stems, Temporary mural at Bonnefanten, Maastricht, 2022

About the Artist

Hadassah Emmerich (1974, Heerlen, NL) obtained her Masters degree of Fine Arts in the famous Goldsmiths College in Londen. Her work is shown internationally in musea and art fairs. She is represented in the collections of Museum Voorlinden, Wassenaar; Federal Government, Brussels; Bonnefantenmuseum, Maastricht; Kunstmuseum Den Haag; Schunck, Heerlen; Museum voor Moderne Kunst Arnhem, Anrhem; Rabobank Nederland, Fries Museum, Leeuwarden, Centraal Museum, Utrecht, Muzee Ostend, amongst others.

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