The White House Gallery is pleased to present the first solo exhibition of Hadassah Emmerich in Belgium. The artist (Heerlen, 1974) studied at the Academy of Fine Art in Maastricht, HISK Antwerp and obtained an M.A. in Fine Art from Goldsmiths College, London. She participated in artist residencies such as Künstlerhaus Bethanien, Berlin, and Instituto Buena Bista, Curaçao. Her work has been exhibited at institutions such as: GEM, The Hague; Bonnefantenmuseum, Maastricht; Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven; Kunstmuseum, Ravensburg; Arp Museum, Rolandseck; MOCA North Miami; MUSAC, Léon; Stedelijk Museum Schiedam and Galeria Kordegarda, Warsaw. Hadassah Emmerich lives and works in Brussels. The monumental five-pannelled work Cold Shoulder Series was recently acquired by the newly inaugurated Museum Voorlinden (Caldic Collection), Wassenaar.

In her paintings, works on paper and painterly installations Emmerich interweaves varied themes such as identity and the body, representations of the exotic and the dialogue between abstraction and figuration. Emmerich selects material from a variety of sources including vintage photography books, texts, advertising and art historical reference books, which are fused together through a process of photomontage which is then transferred onto the canvas using a combination of painting and printing. Negotiating a universe where tropical colors merge effortlessly with cold grey tones, where graphic silhouettes inhabit ephemeral spaces and where references to modernist painting are incorporated into urban space, Emmerich creates a fictionalized narrative in which ‘multiculturalism’ is questioned in a painterly sense.