We are thrilled to announce that HESSE FLATOW now respresents Emma Safir!
The artist will have her first solo exhibition with the gallery in Fall 2025.
Safir's crossmedia practice spans painting, photography, digital manipulation, antiquarian textile techniques, and sculpture. She employs different modes of image generation—rubbings, analog film, digital photography, Photoshop and embroidery—to explore the gendered labor of textiles and how it relates to the history of computing. These invisibilized formations of domestic and digital labor share undervalued status in Western capitalism. Sewing is a language and a method of problem solving. It is also a politicized form of mark making, flouting its gendered domestic origins, or even its traditional use-value.
Safir takes photos of various “privacy solutions,” including privacy glass, reflections, and fabric behind and/or in front of glass which she digitally manipulates and prints on fabric. She cannibalizes her work through multiple media, reusing photographs and materials; in doing this, her paintings go through stages that separate her hand from physical image making while also making her hand more apparent with every technological slip. These processes of reinterpretation and regurgitation create a false sense of indexicality, nodding to what she see as to the fundamental impossibility of an indexical image—what Hito Steyerl refers to as a “poor image,” degraded over time, paradoxically making the image new and singular. Safir uses these principles when expanding materials, like casting low temperature pewter using silicone molds which deteriorate when cast.
Emma Safir makes paintings that utilize fabric manipulation, lens–based media, smocking, rasterization, upholstery, and digitization. Her paintings function as screen simulations, proxies and portals. Safir is interested in hierarchies of labor in relation to gender and digitization, and in image making apparatus and distribution. Safir holds a BFA from RISD in Printmaking and an MFA from Yale in Painting & Printmaking. She has had solo exhibitions at Blade Study, Baxter St at CCNY, SHIN HAUS at Shin Gallery and Bunker Projects; and has participated in group shows at HESSE FLATOW, Galerie Nicolas Robert, Charles Moffett, Jack Barrett, Lyles & King, among others. She has upcoming solo exhibitions with HESSE FLATOW (2025) and Buffalo Institute for Contemporary Art (2026). Safir lives and works in New York City.
2025年2月4日
