ABOUT

London and LA-based British-French artist Emma Neuberg is a painter and installation artist. Best known for her abstract paintings and light projections, her work radiates an effervescent aura in stretched, draped and projected canvases capturing the culture in which she works. Her work has been likened to Charles Schucker and Joan Mitchell by Light & Space artist Laddie John Dill.

Her works are in the public collections of ChelseaSpace, London, (UK), Central Saint Martins’ College of Art & Design, London, (UK), Peloponnese Folklore Foundation, Nafplion, (Greece) and the private collections of Grayson Perry, London, (UK), Simon Wilson London, (UK), FKP Art Collection, Athens, (Greece), and Molly Barnes, Los Angeles, (USA). Her digital works reside in the V&A Museum Digital Programme Archive.

The tension between abuse and escapism drives Neuberg’s vision. The meta-narrative in her work represents the thwarted voice in society and focuses on those caught in oppressive and abusive cultures.

Neuberg’s work presents the effects of culturally-obstructed access and opportunities and the ensuing and cumulative effects of these. She reveals, exposes and explodes the mute, suppressed spaces where cultural obstruction compounds exclusion, exploitation, ambivalence, assumption, projection, assault, dismissal, denial, murder, invisibility, poverty and the physical and mental health consequences of these.

Saff Williams, curator at Studio 7 Projects, host to Frieze Academy London, wrote of Neuberg’s solo show, Drapes, at Aldgate Tower, East London, in 2018:

“Drapes is an immersive forest of twenty fabric folds patterned with brightly bold and textured foliage, bringing the outside world in. Totems to the natural world, this installation subtly breathes in the space as the geometric artworks softly flutter in the breeze and move the viewer’s eye from the artworks’ surface to their abstracted depths.” 

Neuberg’s most recent solo show, Emma Neuberg: Memory of Colour, took place at The Forge, Craft Central UK, in East London in 2019. Curated by Helen Kemp (Somerset House), the British charity presented an immense, site-specific installation of her most famous work to date, Drape, measuring 13 x 6 x 68 feet (4m x 2m x 21m) set alongside large pastels and oil paintings dating 2014 – 19. Shown together for the first time, the works communicate a searing, luminescent glow and radiant statement of intent against oppression and denial in the steely blue shadows of the Victorian ship-building yard.

From 1995, Neuberg studied at the the Royal College of Art, London, and in 2000 was awarded a PhD in Printing Methods for Synthetic Materials. At the RCA, she worked alongside Ron Arad, Julien MacDonald, Alice Temperley and Vivienne Westwood in the School of Materials and has worked with color and print technologies ever since.

Neuberg enjoys several technical awards from TechTextil (Germany), Textile Institute (UK) and National Endowment for the Science Technology and Arts (UK) for her innovations with color and materials. Her London studio features as the backdrop for the HBO/BBC series Civilizations (a remake of Kenneth Clarke’s BBC TV original) for its color section presented by Philip Ball, author of the seminal Bright Earth: Art and the Invention of Color.

Since 2000, she has been a visiting lecturer at Central Saint Martins, Chelsea College of Art & Design, Royal College of Art, Russell Group, V&A Museum (Kensington) and the Royal Museums Greenwich.

In 2016, she was named one of Great Britain’s New Fabric Designers by acclaimed design journalist, Becky Sunshine, in The Observer Magazine and The Guardian. In 2012, she was selected for the Young Masters’ Art Prize UK by Cynthia Corbett at the Cynthia Corbett Gallery in London. In 1997, she was awarded a Sir Winston Churchill Lifetime Fellowship (UK) for her contribution to Industrial Print Technologies for the Arts.

Her first group show in the UK, Artists as Rugmakers, was with Ben Nicholson, Winifred Nicholson, Tim Nicholson, Louisa Creed, Kaffe Fassett, Roderic Hill and EQ Nicholson. The UK touring exhibition, 1994 – 95, heralded the synthesis of British Modernism and textiles in the first and only show of its kind.

The artist describes her paintings as activating works. They present a cognitive, gestural process that culminates in color-rich canvases (analogue and digital) that emit a powdery glow with blended colors and vibratory effects. She uses an unique, performative painting technique that she developed whilst at the Royal College of Art in London, in the late 1990s, and favors patterned and textured ground fabrics over traditional Dutch linen. She paints, prints and soaks cotton, paper and polyester to stretch, suspend, glow, reflect, radiate, animate and speak in volumes. 

Building upon her combined creative, pedagogic and industrial vision, Neuberg is also Founding Director of Textiles Hub London, a collective of international resident artists and designers working with materials in diverse and exciting ways for sale, publication and exhibition.

In 2020, she was recipient of the prestigious Arts Council England Development Award for Painting into Textiles, a project affording her opportunities to develop new large installations and, in 2020 and 2021, she was awarded a Lincoln City Fellowship in Los Angeles, USA.

For all enquiries, please contact the artist’s studio.

Photo credit: Cristina Schek