Hadassah Emmerich: Batik Moon Rising

Hadassah Emmerich (1974, Heerlen) lives and works in Brussels and is known for her lush and sensuous paintings and murals. Her work explores recurring themes such as the body and identity, the sensory and the sensual, the commercialization of the erotic and the exotic. In her exhibition Batik Moon Rising, Emmerich presents a new series of works that mark a shift in her artistic practice.

Batik Moon Rising

The installation features three oil paintings and a digital print that reflect the female body through fragmented pieces reminiscent of fruit, flowers, and other botanical elements. Emmerich uses vinyl cutouts to imprint colored shapes onto canvas and sometimes onto walls. Repetition is a hallmark of Emmerich's work. She is known for compositions in which shapes are multiplied in mechanical sequences or series of color variations.

Psychedelic Landscape

The motifs in the paintings resemble tropical bouquets arranged in the center of the canvas, as if a centripetal force governs the compositions. The depicted volumes seem fleeting and elusive, balanced for just a moment in time. The circular white shape in the upper right of the image evokes a rising moon in a psychedelic landscape, from which the installation takes its title. It is a reference to the song title Bad Moon Rising by Creedence Clearwater Revival.

Hadassah Emmerich

Emmerich, born in Heerlen, returns to the landscape of her childhood for this exhibition. As the child of a Dutch mother and an Indonesian father, her Indonesian background largely remained unfamiliar to her. In a time when critical discussions about the colonial history of the Dutch East Indies or colonialism in general were rare, the local pasar malams were virtually her only contact point with Indo cultures. At the boundary of abstraction, Hadassah Emmerich's painting revolves around questions of exoticism and its complementary counterpart, recognition.