LONDON.- Tiwani Contemporary is presenting You were, you are, and you always will be, Emma Prempeh’s debut solo exhibition with the gallery.
"You were, you are, and you always will be, is a recent body of works representing my exploration of interior spaces pictorially colliding with aspects of my personal history. My thoughts whilst making this series were to build an environment around these moments to physically weave around and between, to grasp moments of familiarity, expectation and nostalgia. My reflections are about how we exist within spaces of (in)tangible realities that are present and simultaneously experienced as metaphysical: spiritual, supernatural, or transcendental." Emma Prempeh
You were, you are, and you always will be, is held in a space poetically circumscribed by ode and elegy to family, and to friendships. The artists’ re-presentations of events extracted from family and personal photographs, are a commentary on the circularity and malleability of time and memory, and how these visual queries can prompt unexpected answers, interpretations, or evolve new questions that resurface as embodied, philosophical, or material embellishment in the experience of them.
The starting point to Prempeh’s paintings is the matter of blackness – the tonal properties of the colour establishes the ground to her paintings and a cinematic basis to invoke and project memories of events, people, and places to emphasise an appreciation of ancestral time and relationships, selfhood and transformation. Schlag metal, a brass alloy of copper and zinc imitative of gold leaf, is a material that Prempeh applies to selected areas of her often large-scale paintings. Over time this oxidises creating slow, live visual changes that animate the image and create a meta-narrative around our experiences of the passing of time, memory and its representation. Prempeh occasionally experiments with projected still and moving imagery to create painting installations that invite other experiential and performative encounters with her work.
Emma Prempeh lives and works in London. She is the inaugural Tiwani Contemporary artist in residence at G.A.S. Foundation, Lagos. She studied at Goldsmiths University of London graduating in 2019 winning the Alumno/Space bursary award for 2020. She recently attended MA Painting at the Royal College of Art under the LeverHulme Trust Arts Scholarship winning the Valerie Beston Trust Arts award for 2022.
Recent exhibitions include In and Out of Time, Ada\contemporary Art Gallery, Accra, Ghana (solo - 2021); Raise Your Glass, The Lightbox Gallery and Museum, Woking (solo - 2020); The Faces of Love, V.O Curations Post Residency Solo Show, Marylebone, London (solo - 2020); On Love, Home by Ronan Mckenzie, Islington, London (group - 2022); Friends and Family, Pi Artworks, Fitzrovia, London (group - 2022); At Peace, Gillian Jason Gallery, Fitzrovia, London (group - 2021); Mother of Mankind, Ada\Contemporary Gallery X Hofa Gallery, Mayfair, London (group - 2021); Onward and Upward-Art in The Garden of Life, Droog Gallery, 7a Staalstraat, Amsterdam (group - 2020); Redressing the Balance #woman Artists, The Lightbox, Woking (group - 2020); Bloomberg New Contemporaries, South London Gallery, London (group - 2020); Bloomberg New Contemporaries, Leeds Art Gallery, Leeds (group - 2019).
