Hadassah Emmerich in Residency

For the past decade, Hadassah Emmerich has developed an extensive, experimental painting practice with room for site-specific encounters, biographical notes and ghost calls from art history. As a female artist from Dutch, German, Chinese and Indonesian descent, she has been strongly preoccupied with representations of ‘the exotic’, a complex issue that Emmerich regards as a mental projection screen and testing ground for investigation into further related topics such as cultural identity, tourism, religion, nature, ornament and psychology.
Emmerich’s hybrid identity seems to appear metaphorically in her work by her eclectic choice of artistic techniques and visual references. Her collage-like paintings often incorporate linocuts and mixed media; both conceptually as in her paint-handling, Emmerich brings different logics and sensibilities together: the coincidental flow of liquid ink meets the solidity of block print, the ephemeral quality of spray fuses into an area of scraped pastels, resulting in carefully composed and sensual compositions.
Emmerich extends this working-method into large-scale murals and painted installations, in which the canvases, works on paper and prints become a non-literal ‘mise en abyme’ – a story within a story- within the mural environment. In these painted sceneries, the viewer is immersed in an associative (par)course that invites to respond on a physical, emotive and intellectual level.

Hadassah Emmerich (1974) studied at the Academy of Fine Arts Maastricht, Higher Insitute for Fine Arts Antwerp and obtained an M.A. in Fine Art from Goldsmiths College, London in 2005.
Her work has been included in numerous international (solo) exhibitions, such as
With Love from Batik Babe, GEM, The Hague (2005); Trial Balloons, MUSAC, Léon (2006); Dark Continents, MOCA North Miami (2008); ‘Be(com)ing Dutch, Van Abbe Museum, Eindhoven (2008);The Salon, Galeria Kordegarda, Warsaw (2008), Ornament and Crime, Palais Aktuelle Kunst, Glückstadt (2010), Conquering the wall, Arp Museum, Rolandseck (2012); Coup de Ville, Attracted by Another Level, Warp Foundation, Sint Niklaas (2013), Appassionata, die Sammlung Selinka im Dialog, Kunstmuseum Ravensburg (2013) CORPOREAL, Schunck, Heerlen (2014) and Painting Adrift, Stedelijk Museum Schiedam (2014).