Weiss Falk is pleased to announce Secret and Waves, Emily Sundblad’s second exhibition with the gallery.

Emily

Now that Emily Sundblad and I live thousands of miles apart, the fabric of our friendship is woven from diverse threads of messaging “methods”: texts sent across time zones, shared photos of street scenes or randomly encountered treasures that elaborate the secret language of our friendship, forwarded Instagram posts, a bit of song captured and transmitted via WhatsApp, an emailed extract of an auction catalog, etc.  And so, when she sent me a group of images depicting recently painted works that will make up her upcoming exhibition at Weiss Falk, Zurich (opening April 25), their range of references, eloquent harmonies and diverse plot lines reminded me of the spectrum of communicative forms we have exchanged for our formerly quotidian contact.

Her paintings fantastical characters recall the figurative work of Florine Stettheimer, James Ensor and Ludwig Bemelmans, in all their lush color, imaginative detail, and whimsical, sometimes dark, theatricality.  Literary details emerge, tumbling from Sundblad’s deft brushwork, like pieces of the famous rejection letter, torn to bits by Madame Bovary and flung fluttering from her carriage window as it passed through the streets of Rouen. The multiple seascapes, painted for the exhibition, are settings for scenes both intimate and fraught, redolent with potential turbulence yet scapes of pleasure and purity, like the shores of the island of Ponza, so treasured by Paul Thek. 

These themes and motifs will be further embellished by a suite of recordings presented at the gallery, the result of a collaboration between Sundblad and musician Emmett Kelly. The music they made together was the result of furtive recording sessions, made at her Manhattan apartment with the assistance of quantities of cold champagne, yet sung softly, so as not to wake her young daughter, who was asleep in an adjoining room.

One canvas depicts a young blond protagonist (not dissimilar in appearance to the artist herself) seated on the lap of an elegantly suited, green skinned and cloven-hoofed satyr, who whispers seductively, and evidently pleasingly, in her ear. The Zurich audience of Sundblad’s exhibition are hereby forewarned: her work emits a similar siren call, slightly discordant yet irresistible, and will surely seduce and capture.

T. J. Wilcox

Milano, 2024