 
paintings
In her painting, Emma Bennett investigates the emotions associated with love and death that include desire, fear and vulnerability. The work consists of appropriated imagery (such as fruit, flowers and animals) that are painted in oil and placed within monochromatic veils of poured lacquer. Bennett employs a celebratory combination of languages, revealing an abstract sensibility and an affinity with the materials used. Essentially, the work explores the relationship between abstraction and representation; contemporary and historical; signifier and signified.
Much of Bennett’s most recent work pays tribute to the still life painting of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The artist endeavours to retain the luminosity of the original source material but re-presents the pictorial motifs in new compositional arrangements so as to suggest a new narrative. Captivated by the delicate surfaces and the use of light in the original paintings, Bennett finds the symbolism of fruit and flowers equally resonant. Yet, by creating intense monochrome surfaces using lacquer, Bennett also looks to the abstract expressionist tradition and the associated notion of the void.
Emma has a tendency to work in series. Her Game series, for example, re-presents iconic imagery of dead rabbits, slain partridges and hunted deer from the work of Dutch artists such as Weenix, Oudry and Chardin.
Having graduated with a first class BA honours from Central Saint Martin’s in 1996, Emma completed her MA at Chelsea College of Art and Design in September 1998. Since graduation, she has exhibited in both solo and group shows in the UK and Europe.
| |
|
|
 |
Blood 3, Oil & French Enamel on canvas, 62cm x 92cm
sold |
| |
|
Pea Pods, Oil & French Enamel on MDF, 28cm x 36cm- £1,050.00
|
| |
 |
Dead Hare on Green Veil (detail), Oil & French Enamel on MDF 61x71 cm £1,200.00 |
| |
| |
|
| |
| |
|
| |
|
|
©
CAVALIERO FINN 2008 |
