Emma Fineman's new contemporary paintings that explore dream-like realms and desires

On show at Public Gallery in London, this March, Realms of the (Un) Real, reveals intimate windows into the artist's mind – reoccurring dreams, fetishised desires and vast imagined psychological spaces. Within these fantastical settings the figures, for the most part self-portraits, are rendered as dwindling visages neither present nor absent, seemingly at the intersection of existence.

Fineman’s works explore methods to fracture and reconfigure pictorial space, as a means to describe and digest the dense compression and specialisation of time in contemporary culture.

"In our moment, we are inundated with visual information that renders our ability to understand and process experience, as well as our sense of time and perspective, haphazard if not indeed skewed," explains Public Gallery. "Fineman’s works contemplate what happens to narrative under such conditions and examine the possibilities of figurative painting to both extend and compress descriptive time within this framework."

The exhibition’s title alludes to The Story of the Vivian Girls, in What Is Known as the Realms of the Unreal, of the Glandeco-Angelinian War Storm, Caused by the Child Slave Rebellion, a multi-volume fantasy manuscript and body of illustrations produced over several decades by the reclusive artist Henry Darger (1892-1973).

"Like Darger," the Gallery continues, "Fineman’s sources lay deep in her memory and in that unknowable region of the psyche where yearning, aspiration and an expressive impulse reside. However, Fineman’s paintings go beyond pure fantasy, instead depicting realms of eternity that blur our traditional conceptions of what is real and unreal, mirroring our increasingly distorted experience of contemporary life.

"Belonging to a realm unto themselves, Fineman’s paintings become a space to contemplate and to reflect. Her internal desires are played out in a series of expressive and gestural marks that sit somewhere between drawing and painting; somewhere between the quick note to jot down an idea, and a more prolonged meditation on the parts of daily life that for some unknowable reason affix themselves to back of one’s mind and kick about with an unnerving permanence."

Born in Berkeley, California, Emma Fineman lives and works in London. In 2018, she graduated with an MA in Painting from the Royal College of Art, London, and graduated Magna Cum Laude with a BFA in Painting from Maryland Institute of Art in 2013.

Among other awards, Fineman was a finalist of the ‘John Moores Painting Prize’ hosted at The Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool (2018) and was selected as one of the ‘Bloomberg New Contemporaries’ exhibiting at The South London Gallery (2018). Discover more: emmafineman.com.