OPENING EVENT: Wednesday, 23 September, 5.30-7.30pm

For her new solo exhibition, Emily Wolfe presents a body of work that navigates the unstable territory between intimacy and distance, memory and materiality. Across the exhibition, forms emerge and dissolve through layered surfaces, gestures, and fragments, inviting viewers into spaces that feel at once deeply personal and strangely collective.

Wolfe's recent work, developed while living between London and Rome, explores the relationship between painting, archaeology and the fragment. Drawing on Roman fresco painting, she has become intrigued by the ways damaged and partial works are preserved, restored and reconstructed, and in the transformation that occurs when paintings are removed from their original architectural contexts and re-presented within the museum. These processes of fragmentation, displacement and reconstruction inform her own approach to painting, where the fragment becomes a means of exploring questions of memory, materiality and the passage of time.

Wolfe’s practice is driven by an attention to tension: between control and accident, permanence and erosion, visibility and concealment. Working intuitively, she builds compositions that resist fixed interpretation, allowing ambiguity to become an active and generative force. Marks accumulate like traces of lived experience — interrupted, revised, and continually in flux.

Rather than offering resolution, the exhibition creates a rhythm of encounter. Textures, repetitions, and subtle shifts in scale draw attention to the physical act of looking, asking viewers to slow down and inhabit moments of uncertainty. Wolfe treats material not simply as a medium, but as a record of time, pressure, and transformation.

At its core, the exhibition considers how we hold emotion within objects, spaces, and bodies. The works hover between abstraction and recognition, revealing fleeting impressions that feel both fragile and insistent. In doing so, Wolfe opens a space where vulnerability is neither spectacle nor confession, but a quiet condition of being.
Coinciding with the exhibition is Wolfe’s inclusion in Imaginative Reality, a major group exhibition at Yu-Hsiu Museum of Art in Taiwan, on view from 19 September 2026 to 17 January 2027. This exhibition examines the theme of “uncertainty” in contemporary painting by exploring how artists’ creative practices reveal deeper meanings behind visual imagery.

Together, these presentations extend the artist’s ongoing exploration of perception, embodiment, and the poetics of process across distinct geographic and institutional contexts. In doing so, they further establish her engagement with material sensitivity, spatial tension, and the instability of memory.