Emma Prempeh in her studio. Courtesy of Emma Prempeh Studio
Emma Prempeh lives and works in London. She studied at Goldsmiths University of London graduating in 2019 winning the Alumno/Space bursary award for 2020. She recently attended MA Painting at the Royal College of Art under the LeverHulme Trust Arts Scholarship winning the Valerie Beston Trust Arts Award for 2022.
The starting point to Prempeh’s paintings is the matter of blackness – the tonal properties of the colour establishes the ground to her paintings and a cinematic basis to invoke and project memories of events, people, and places to emphasise 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 oxidises 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.
Recent exhibitions include Free The Wind The Spirit And The Sun, Stephen Friedman Gallery (group-2023); In And Out Of Time, Gallery 1957 (group - 2023); In Presence and Absence, Ordovas Gallery (Solo - 2023); With Tenderness, Tiwani Contemporary, London, UK (group - 2023); You were, you are, and you always will be, Tiwani Contemporary, Lagos, Nigeria (solo - 2022); In and Out of Time, Ada\contemporary Art Gallery, Accra, Ghana (solo - 2021); Raise Your Glass, The Lightbox Gallery and Museum, Woking (solo - 2020); The Faces of Love, V.O Curations Post Residency Solo Show- Marylebone, London (solo - 2020) ; On Love, Home by Ronan Mckenzie, Islington, London (group - 2022); Friends and Family, Pi Artworks, Fitzrovia, London (group - 2022); At Peace, Gillian Jason Gallery, Fitzrovia, London (group - 2021); Mother of Mankind, Ada \ Contemporary Gallery X Hofa Gallery, Mayfair, London (group - 2021); Onward and Upward-Art in The Garden of Life, Droog Gallery, 7a Staalstraat, Amsterdam (group - 2020); Redressing the Balance #woman Artists, The Lightbox, Woking (group - 2020); Bloomberg New Contemporaries, South London Gallery, London (group - 2020); Bloomberg New Contemporaries, Leeds Art Gallery, Leeds (group - 2019).