Emma Cousin: Landmark
November 12-December 21, 2024
Jessica Silverman is pleased to announce “Emma Cousin: Landmark,” the artist’s first exhibition with the gallery and first solo presentation in the United States. On view November 12 through December 21, 2024, the exhibition features 8 new paintings and a selection of drawings inspired by the Jurassic Coast in southern England. These works map new visual and conceptual territories for the artist, reconfiguring the body and landscape into one. Notably, Cousin employs a broadened spectrum of green hues in her unification of the corporeal and ecological.
Throughout the exhibition, Cousin’s vivid, exaggerated figures are elevated to dense, highly chromatic clusters of entangled humans and animals with verdant, imagined terrains. Her exploration of abstracted bodily forms utilizes humor, experiments in color, and surreal imagery to challenge the conventional division of the artistic subject and its surroundings. In Cover Point (2024), bodies are camouflaged and revealed through allusions to cartography, as though contorting figures emerge from layers of soil, peat, clay and flora. Cousin’s inventive play on scale brings landscape and limbs into the macro; heads double as mountains with eyes peering in all directions.
Fossa (2024), by contrast, looks to art historical legacies of surrealism, stained glass, and medieval anatomy to examine a vibrant microcosm that is home to some of the Earth’s tiniest creatures. Multi-plane perspectives draw parallels between anatomical grooves that resemble impressions of prehistoric matter. Soft, organic curves are segmented by geometric quadrants, highlighting a cross-section of scientific observation and personal mythology. Glimmering paint propels insect life into alien realms, mirroring the glint of finding meaning in things beyond our understanding.
“Landmark” employs humor and playfulness to reconsider landscape as not external to oneself but enmeshed within our bodily experience. Greens ranging from radiant jewel tones to indicators of illness recall both the terrestrial and mortal; figures contort and renegotiate themselves as both creature and environment. Dissolving the boundaries between body and land, Cousin invites us to reimagine and expand our relationship to the natural world.
Emma Cousin (b. Yorkshire, UK, 1986) is a painter and drawer based in London. She received her BA from Oxford University’s Ruskin School of Fine Art. She has enjoyed numerous solo exhibitions in London; including Goldsmiths Center for Contemporary Art, as well as group exhibitions throughout Europe and in China. Cousin has received the Hogchester Arts residency (2024), Survey Award (2019), and Skowhegan School of Painting residency (2018), among others. Her work is included in public collections, including, the Arts Council Collection, London; Xiao Museum, China; Zuzeum Museum, Riga, Latvia; Aishti Foundation, Lebanon; W Art Foundation, Hong Kong; and Zabludowicz Collection, London.
