EMMA ITZSTEIN

EMMA ITZSTEIN: I CARRY YOUR LANDSCAPES WITH MINE

OTOMYS CONTEMPORARY

15 - 30 SEPTEMBER 2022 | Click here for the exhibition interview. Click here for available works.

Emma Itzstein’s exhibition I carry your landscapes with mine investigates theories that explore a collective and singular experience through painting, a shared perception through art history. The artworks narrate a point in life that is still and solitary; however, this point is the beginning of a new venture.

I carry your landscapes with mine plays with perception and the multiplicity of time—a personal narrative versus a collective experience. A moment alone, shared with the landscape. A place of energy, charged by nature and the humans who inhabit it. The paintings, full of colourful gesture and mark-making expression, narrate how one can interact with the huge world catastrophes at play (from climate change, the pandemic, lockdowns, and war), but still find space for the individual stories and radical compassion where our energy is depleted in the face of collective trauma.

Figures permeate the landscape; swashes of painting leave texture on the canvas in a balance of light and dark hues. The bright and neon green colours of the ferns and reeds, found next to Australia’s inland water holes, juxtapose the inky pools or dark tree trunks. The landscape, the rocks upon the bodies perch and leap from, are captured in pastel pinks and distinctively Australian orange tones. But put together with hints of purples and ultramarine blue, add an otherworldly aspect; the palette turns the artworks into representations of Itzstein’s memories rather than physical places.

Influenced by both old masters and contemporaries, I carry your landscapes with mine is filled with references to abstract landscape artists such as Monet, Hurvin Andersson, and Cecily Brown. The most notable is Joan Mitchell and her retrospective I carry my landscapes around with me at David Zwirner, New York, 2019. Itzstein paints her own versions of a Joan Mitchell, only to then paint over the top, small glimpses remaining—peeking out and taking shape in the new composition.

In other works, Itzstein has applied the same process over her own paintings. For the artist, they become a comment on time and painting, multiplicity, history and subjectivity. The artworks have their own conversation, flowing naturally throughout the process; Itzstein finding an authentic start and end point. She shares a quote by Cecily Brown, ‘I don’t finish, I just stop… because it’s a moment where you say I’m going to stop now, it’s not that it’s finished.’

Central to her concepts are the theory of time and infinite possibility, in both the artworks and the process. I carry your landscapes with mine is the result of Itzstein wanting to disrupt potential ‘formulaic’ methods — instead, to have a more meaningful relationship with every individual painting through a process of play, surrender, and experimentation. The artist looks to Giles Deleuze and his concepts of difference, ‘everything is constantly changing, and reality is a becoming, not a being.’ A sentiment mirrored in Cecily Brown’s 2022 show with Blum and Poe, ‘the end is a new beginning.’

A playful approach is evident through the paintings’ composition and process. Itzstein uses imagery of play and enjoyment in the landscape, but her brushwork also reveals this exploration into expression. The all-over effect fills the canvas with vivid colour and mark-making.

The artist represents a singular moment filled with infinite subjective experiences, for example, a birth and a death occurring simultaneously. This juxtaposition becomes even more multifaceted through covid lockdowns. ‘In Melbourne and Sydney, people are locked in their houses and are seriously struggling; five hours away in Darwin, people are gathering by a gorge or waterfall just having a fun and joyful time,’ the artist shares.

The figures within the paintings offer an insight into this concept. Days of honey, 2022, sees one person leaning on the rock, finding her footing as she ventures into the water. Another, at contrast, freely leaps into the pool. In A timeless conversation, 2022, one person in black shorts, another in a green bikini, are caught in a shared, intimate moment within the natural landscape, while a few others bob along anonymously in the inky blue background.

In some artworks, the landscapes are void of humans. A quiet force, 2022, is a dazzling array of textural brushwork; the reflection of the greens, blues, pinks, purples, oranges, and yellow fill the canvas with all over colour. Similarly, Pure becoming, 2022, captures the energy of the environment; the river is filled with movement, the foliage dances across the painting.

Itzstein concludes that conceptually she wants a link between the visual manifestation of multiplicity and potentiality, the variety of mixed materials she uses, and the authenticity of the process. The artworks offer an insight into her process, a dance in the studio, depicting a ‘choose your own adventure’, without an endpoint or expectations. There is freedom to let the landscape take its own course revealed in the oscillation between abstraction and representational, a spectrum of possibility built through layers and layers. As Mitchell shares, ‘a painting does not end — it is the only thing that is both continuous and still.’

Written by Emma-Kate Wilson

Photographed by Matthew Stanton