Emma Prempeh lives and works in London, and is the inaugural Tiwani Contemporary artist in residence at G.A.S. Foundation, Lagos. She studied at Goldsmiths University of London graduating in 2019 and winning the Alumno/Space bursary award for 2020. She received an MA in Painting at the Royal College of Art under the Leverhulme Trust Arts Scholarship, winning the Valerie Beston Trust Arts award for 2022. Tiwani Contemporary now presents ‘You Were, You Are, and You Always Will Be’, Prempeh’s debut solo exhibition with the gallery.
Discussing the show Prempeh shares, “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.”
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 color establish the ground for her paintings and a cinematic basis to invoke and project memories of events, people, and places to emphasize 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 oxidizes 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.
The show runs from the 10th of September to the 22nd of October 2022. For further information, visit the gallery website.
Image: Emma Prempeh, And So On, 2022, Oil, Acrylic, Iron Powder and Imitation Gold Leaf on Canvas with projection, 320 x 200 cm.
Courtesy of the artist and Tiwani Contemporary.
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