Private International Collection

Mall Galleries Art Consultancy is delighted to inform that Emily Gillbanks' artwork, 'Is it Broken', has been successfully placed in a prestigious international art collection. 

Emily Gillbanks:

'The subjects I paint are underpinned by technology. I situate my oil paintings both at odds and indebted to a trajectory of Realism.

From self-portraits to portraits of family and friends I look at how subjects and objects are characterised within the same structure. Through a history of figuration and mimetic ontologies that I deliberate to what extent the physical presence of a sitter is no longer beings most eminent mode.

My practice thinks through what it means to paint from life today when my screen has become a representative and vernacular account of vision. I sensitise and desensitise economies of details beyond life observed through automatic eyes, observing life akin to a data attainment process. I am questioning the surface of things. How can I make a subject's hair read as hair, how can I make their skin read as skin, how can I make a rug read as rug?

It is through the way that I observe these details that my outlines and saturated colours come to operate with a screen like vibrancy, reflecting a hybridisation of traditional techniques and contemporary technologies. I use oil paint like I am using the cut-out tool on Photoshop, which reflects one way in which I have felt accustomed to seeing life backlit via my screen'.