Brimming with colour and light, Emma Webster’s Primavera from 2019 is a window into the mystical and otherworldly. Embellished with theatrical illumination, Primavera is a natural vista relished with artifice, drama, and distortion. Though filled with the familiar forms of trees and plants, pink skies, climbings florals, and the figure of a blue horse subtly yet definitively align the image with an ethereal realm. Formed through a hybrid sketching-sculpting process, Webster first constructs her scenes via digitally rendered imagery. As Webster describes, “Landscape painting is really a history of space and how we perceive it and where things are against a horizion… What I’m interested in the ways in which we’re used to being lied to and the ways in which we’re not” (Webster quoted in: Michael Slenske, “In the Studio With Emma Webster, the Artist Propelling Landscape Painting Into the Future,” W Magazine, 23 August 2022 (online)). Webster’s painterly practice forges new relationships between artist and artwork, between artwork and viewer, and between humans and their natural, or rather unnatural, surroundings.

Webster is a graduate of Stanford University and Yale University, where she received an MFA in Painting in 2018. In 2022, she had her debut solo exhibitions with Perotin Gallery in Seoul, South Korea, and her work was included in the group exhibition Fire Figure Fantasy: Selections from ICA Miami’s collects ion at the Institute of Contemporary Art Miami. She currently lives and works in Los Angeles, California.