EMILIA KINA

Emilia Kina’s three-dimensional curtain paintings explore the act of ‘peeping’ and the reflection it casts on the viewer. When Gustav Courbets L’Origine du monde (The Origin of the World), 1866, depicting a detailed painting of a woman's exposed genitals, was added to Halil Şerif Pasha’s private collection of erotic art, he kept the work concealed behind a dark green curtain in his dressing room, inviting only a select few to take a ‘peep’. 

For Emilia Kina, researching the L’Origine du Monde during her study at Jan Matejko Academy of Fine Arts in Kraków triggered an investigation into the curtain as a painting object and into ‘peeping’ as a reciprocal act that reveals something about the ‘peeper’. Prising the image from its two-dimensional bounds Kina imbeds the curves of the curtains into the structure of her paintings, so the surface slopes and rises like the folds of hanging textiles. 

Referencing painters like surrealist Rene Magritte, who’s curtains encircle skies and frames stretching horizons, Kina wraps the viewer within the curtains folds. One of Kina’s paintings swallows us into swathes of pink, blue and green fabric. There's an illicitness to peeking between the soft folds of a curtain, that instigates a desire to ‘peep’ at something hidden within. Despite their dimensionality, and the movement in their gentle curves, there's an eerie stillness to the layers of fabric. They refuse the fallible privacy of a curtain that allows a gap to be blown open in the breeze. The artist forces peeping to become a conscious act by the viewer, underpinned by an itch to peel back the folds and reveal. All at once, the inability to reveal, to see, makes possible the potential of being observed. 

This is intensified in the edition to Kina’s spotlight series, where the framing draws the viewer out from the crowd. The scale isolates the viewer, standing alone facing a single spotlight, encompassed by the folds of red curtains. Without being lost in the audience, where you can be shrouded in anonymity, Kina has turned the spotlight onto the peeper, and the feeling of being watched presses in. The reveal turns threatening but never comes. Instead, we’re suspended in internal drumroll.