Emma Webster
Cyclotrauma, 2021
Oil on canvas
152,4 × 213,4 cm
About the work
Cyclotrauma (2021) is a landscape painting by Emma Webster. Yet it is important not to describe her simply as a landscape painter.
Webster paints landscapes, but she first constructs these landscapes herself. They do not emerge from directly observing an existing landscape. Instead, she reconstructs nature using still-life models and scenographic studies and, in her more recent work, Virtual Reality.
As a result, the natural world in her paintings appears both familiar and strange. Clouds swell and seem to bubble. Sunlight cuts sharply through the scene. Trees twist into unusual forms, while mountains appear to bend and break.
These landscapes do not exist in reality. Yet they can create the impression of being based on real places, as though Webster had transformed and reworked a landscape she once saw before reconstructing it in her own visual language.
The word 'constructing' is important here. Webster herself speaks of 'building'. While artists traditionally work from life or from a photograph, producing preparatory drawings or sketches, Webster constructs her landscapes.
Virtual Reality has allowed her to develop this working method even further. In VR, she can move through her imagined spaces as though they were cinematic environments. This enables her not only to design the space, but also to experience it, as it were, from within.
Something remarkable then occurs: this entirely constructed spatial environment is translated back onto a flat surface - the painting.
This process can be sculptural, involving physical models, or digital, using Virtual Reality. The end point remains the same: a three-dimensionally conceived landscape becomes a two-dimensional object.
In Cyclotrauma, digital and traditional painting thus come together. As the original text describes it, Webster gives digital pixels the historical patina of painting, anchoring them once again in the physical world of objects.
Emma Webster
° in 1989 in Encinitas, United States. Lives and works in Los Angeles, United States.
She received her bachelor's degree from Stanford University in 2011 and a Master of Fine Arts in painting from Yale University in 2018.
Webster is best known for her landscapes, which bring together traditional painting and contemporary digital image-making. In 2021, she published Lonescape: Green, Painting, & Mourning Reality, a collection of reflections on landscape and image-making in an increasingly digital world.
Her work has been exhibited internationally, with solo exhibitions at venues including Petzel in New York, Perrotin in Paris, Hong Kong and Seoul, Jeffrey Deitch in Los Angeles and Stems Gallery in Brussels. She has also participated in group exhibitions at institutions including White Cube in London, the Institute of Contemporary Art Miami and the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego.
Her work is held in several international collections, including the Centre Pompidou in Paris, LACMA in Los Angeles, the Pérez Art Museum Miami, the Yuz Museum in Shanghai and the Groeninghe Art Collection in Bruges.