Emma Verhulst ( 1994 Antwerp) holds a MA in the visual arts from Sint Lucas School of
Arts in Antwerp. She embarked on international internships in Toronto, Rotterdam and
Marseille early in her career and held residencies, among other places, at Frans Masereel
Centrum (Kasterlee) and Wiels (Brussels). She lives and works in Antwerp.
Her work touches on the interior, exterior, domesticity, and perhaps a remnant of her
background in illustration and graphic design, a narrative thread underlies her practice.
Emma's visual language starts from an intuitive drawing that evokes associations and which
she transforms through accumulation into alienating, at times unsettling work. Her visual
shorthand and the rapid pace at which the paintings are created make a familiar and strange
universe, both indubitable and dysfunctional. Influenced by the media, the paintings and
drawings are reinforced by restlessness and detachment; they depict fragments of places
resulting from a “zapping-through". It is not in her interest to present a linear narrative, and
many of the works come close to text without being it. The joy, control, disgust, suspicion,
celebration, and surprise are just a few of the things noted she engages in within her studio.