Fredric Snitzer Gallery is pleased to present To Live Without a Dying Sun, a solo exhibition by Queer, Cuban-American artist Ema Ri. Marking the artist’s debut exhibition with the gallery, Ri has produced a selection of new oil paintings and dry wall works that delve into themes of resilience and power, drawing inspiration from both the natural world and personal experience.
For the past seven years, Ri has collected subtropical flowers from their surroundings, creating ephemeral floral sculptures that incorporate body impressions or are compressed into new forms. These explorations have profoundly influenced their practice, inspiring a series of emotionally charged oil paintings.
Through a process of layering and abstraction, Ri’s brushless technique imbues each piece with a raw, tactile energy. The physical use of their hands and nails as well as their body in relation to the canvas imparts a visceral sensation or action – a caressing of the canvas, a scratching, or a longing for something felt within and outside the confines of the pictorial plane. This action feels sensitive and romantic when paired with the visual references to the landscape – a color field of flora and weeds simultaneously in bloom and in decay, distress and stillness, rich with metaphors of life and death.
Ema Ri is captivated by the ethereal qualities of life in the natural world and uses their experiences to explore the unseen forces that guide us. Their work reflects an ongoing fascination with the ethereal forces that shape our existence, offering a meditation on survival, transformation, and the unseen rhythms of nature.
About Ema Ri
Ema Ri graduated with a BFA from the New World School of the Arts. They have had residencies at the NWSA Alumni Studio Program (2017), Oolite Arts (2022-23), Kinosaito Arts in New York (2022), Atlantic Center for the Arts (2023), and the Museum of Art and Design (2024). Ri's work has been exhibited at esteemed institutions such as the Crisp-Ellert Art Museum at Flagler College (2024), Oolite Arts (2022-23), and Locust Projects (2021), and they have had solo exhibitions at Spinello Projects (2021, 2023) and Dimensions Variable (2020). Their art was notably featured in "You Know Who You Are" at El Espacio 23 (2022-23) and is held in the collections of the Jorge Perez Collection, The Debra and Dennis Scholl Collection, and Miami Dade's Department of Arts and Cultural Affairs. Ri is the recipient of the South Florida Cultural Consortium award (2022), the Ellie's Creator Award (2022), and the Andy Warhol Foundation Wavemaker award (2021-2022). They were also a finalist for the CINTAS Visual Arts Fellowship at the Lowe Art Museum (2017).
