NEW YORK, NY.- Bortolami announced the representation of Emily Sundblad (b. 1977, Dalsjöfors, Sweden; based in New York). The gallery will present a new painting by Sundblad at Art Basel Miami Beach this December.
Working across painting, performance, and music, as well as being the Co-founder of Reena Spaulings Fine Art and a member of the Reena Spaulings collective, Sundblad moves fluidly between identities and collaborative contexts.
In Sundblad’s paintings, the fight for happiness is wildly inclusive of subject matter and any momentary impulse...dreams, costumes, writing, sentiments, animals, others, daily life. It’s in the multiplicity of motifs, as one scene happens upon the next and then colors begin to blaze and flower in excess of whatever information they bring. The paintings are “legion” and also dream-like in their spatial distortions and in the sprouting of one vignette from another, in their disorienting joy of displacement.
Sundblad’s trajectory as an artist is emblematic of the downtown decadence that ran from the ART CLUB2000 to Bernadette Corporation’s runway critiques of the neoliberal art market. She moved to New York from London in 1998 to study at Parsons while forging a theatrical and subversive persona in New York nightlife. She founded Reena Spaulings Fine Art with John Kelsey in 2004, a unique artist-run commercial space in Manhattan's Chinatown. Sundblad will present a new theatrical production with Ken Okiishi at New Theater Hollywood in February 2027.
Solo exhibitions include Bortolami, New York; Emanuela Campoli, Milan; House of Gaga, Mexico City, Guadalajara and Los Angeles; Weiss Falk, Zürich and Basel; Campoli Presti, Paris; Galerie Hussenot, Paris; Galerie Neu, Berlin; The Kitchen, New York; Greenspon Gallery, New York; Lars Bohman Gallery, Stockholm; Xavier Hufkens, Brussels; Le Consortium, Dijon and White Columns, New York, among others.
Selected group exhibitions include Centraal Museum, Utrecht, Netherlands; Museion, Bolzano, Italy; Kunst Halle Sankt Gallen, Switzerland; Casa Masaccio Centro per l’Arte Contemporanea, San Giovanni Valdarno, Italy; MUMOK, Vienna; Gladstone Gallery, New York; Bundeskunsthalle, Bonn; The Kitchen, New York; Hoffmann Mahler Wallenberg, Nice; Marian Goodman Gallery, London; Off Vendome, Düsseldorf; Fiorucci Art Trust, Stromboli; and the 2014 Whitney Biennial, New York, among others.
