Emma Stern, Home Bodies, 2021

This poster, featuring Emma Stern’s ‘Yelena (Party Popper)’ (2021), was produced for the artist’s 2021 solo exhibition ‘Home Bodies’ with Carl Kostyál at Hospitalet, Stockholm. The technical skill with which Stern brings her characters to life owes much to her classical training – she has cited studying Italian Renaissance painting as her starting point for her grounding in draughtsmanship and chiaroscuro – but it is the Surrealists that hold most fascination for her – Max Ernst, Man Ray and Salvador Dalí – and the objectified, context-less beautiful female figures who recur in their work as creatures made to exist only in painted form. Non-physical, even subsconscious space is her territory, her paintings like ‘postcards from cyberspace’ (Malachosky), charged with an intense, knowing eroticism, a little magic and a healthy sense of outrage at the casual schoolboy misogyny of coders.

Year: 2021
Size: 16.5 x 23.4 inches (42.0 x 59.4 cm)
Framed: Sold unframed