With Seven Paintings, Emma Verhulst (1994) presents her first solo exhibition at Pizza Gallery in Antwerp. Upon entering, four oil paintings dominate the space, where hazy shapes materialize—a melting ice cream, a fish with a worm, a scar. Despite their modest size, the works exude an intense, almost insistent presence. What at first appears elusive gradually reveals Verhulst’s artistic approach.
Her subjects seem arbitrarily chosen, connected by an intuitive logic—but appearances can be deceiving. Contaminated pastels bleed into one another, creating a fragile balance between cohesion and discomfort. What exactly is being shown here? The self-referential titles—Stitches (2024), Ice Cream (2024), Fish and Worm (2024), Gloves (2024)—name the depicted objects without dispelling their ambiguity. It is precisely in their elusiveness that a latent sense of estrangement resonates, a tension Verhulst carefully cultivates.
Verhulst obsessively collects images—both online and offline—that intrigue her through their texture or context: a scar, a fragmented body, a shimmering object. She sources them from iPhone screenshots, pop culture, self-portraits, and casually gathered trinkets, organizing them into thematic collections. By zooming in, cropping, filtering, and abstracting, she gradually transforms them—first as photographs, then through projections, and finally through swift, rhythmic brushstrokes. Her fleeting, singular compositions reveal a sharp graphic sensibility, yet despite having painted for only four years, her approach is assured. Perhaps this vagueness resonates because we increasingly experience the world through glass—through windows, screens, and filtered reflections.
The title Seven Paintings refers not only to the number of works but also to their internal coherence—as a family bound by color and composition. Each painting centers on a single subject. These objects appear as figures, trapped within their own world, briefly conversing in the intimate exhibition space. They seem to hover in a state of suspended indifference—contemplative, melancholic, like fragments of an intangible whole. Yet an overarching narrative remains deliberately absent.
A recurring thread throughout the exhibition is the tension between isolation and connection. The soft pastel tones may appear innocent, yet they carry an underlying contamination. The initial playfulness of the images gradually gives way to a subdued melancholy, occasionally tinged with adolescent humor. The titles name the works but do not clarify them. This becomes evident when the hollow eyes of a panda in Piggy Bank (2024) suddenly meet your gaze, or when Annie (2024)—a fragmented close-up of a doll—evokes an inexplicable discomfort. Verhulst insists on distance: at times, she thins her oil paint to suggest speed and transience; at others, she abstracts the human body into near unrecognizability. She is present in her work yet simultaneously withdraws—sharpening our awareness of the illusory nature of privacy in contemporary society.
Verhulst’s paintings breathe the visual language of a millennial generation. They form a veil behind which she hides, while simultaneously evoking a diffuse atmosphere—a quiet testament to how innocence and sweetness are imperceptibly consumed by the contemporary world. As modern still lifes, her works depict a fragile, slightly bruised girlhood, where colors dissolve and forms blur. The glossy surfaces and almost tangible ‘fleshiness’—beneath the playful, tactile images, a subtle violence simmers.
Verhulst’s subjects appear as cherished objects, bearing traces of use, attachment, or loss. They teeter on the fine line between collecting and hoarding—where value, categorization, and context determine whether something is meaningful or disposable. In her paintings, these objects transform into symbols of a fragile, personal world. Her work reflects an ongoing negotiation with the images and objects that shape our sense of self-worth—between affection and transience, memory and consumption.
Her paintings read like fragments from a diary, relics from a phantasmagorical reality in which muted objects guide our gaze toward a deep-seated social unease. Verhulst reads society as a ghostly premonition: a feverish spectacle, a dystopian suffocation by all-consuming entertainment, flashing lights—a world where boundaries blur and control is nothing more than an illusion. In these quiet scenes, personal alienation subtly intertwines with a broader social dimension. By appropriating this discomfort and distilling a new microcosm from it, Verhulst transforms a space of unease into one of meaning.
Isabel Van Bos, 2025.
Artists: Emma Verhulst