Emma Prempeh - The Nearness of Elsewhere, 2025

The painting stops you before you have had a chance to prepare yourself
for it. At the scale of a wall — a work this large does not hang in a room so
much as reorganise it — The Nearness of Elsewhere folds two realities
into one continuous surface: on the left, the amber-lit interior of a living
room at night, a sofa, a fireplace, pendant lights casting warm cones of
shadow, the whole scene given an otherworldly charge by a large rectangle of
beaten schlag metal, a brass alloy that imitates gold leaf, embedded in the
composition like a window into another frequency. On the right, without
transition or apology, the painting opens onto an exterior: a suspension
bridge’s cable tower rising against a turbulent blue-grey sky, trees in full
summer leaf, the grey-green of a river beyond. The two spaces are not collaged
together — they bleed into one another, separated only by the breath of a
curtain, the thinness of a threshold.

 

This is precisely Prempeh’s subject. She has spoken of how the work
merges the architecture of Hull’s bay windows and terrace houses, the views of
the Humber Bridge from its banks, and imagery drawn from her native South
London — different places held simultaneously in the body of a single painting,
as diasporic experience holds them simultaneously in the body of a person. The
painting does not choose between interior and exterior, between belonging and
elsewhere, between memory and the present. It refuses to. That refusal is its
deepest formal intelligence.

The work was made for and first shown in the exhibition The Nearness
of Elsewhere at 87 Gallery, Artlink Hull (October–December 2024), a
commission developed over an extended period of research in which Prempeh led
workshops, attended community gatherings, and invited Hull residents to
contribute directly to her canvases through collaborative mark-making, images,
and text. These contributions are embedded within the surface of the work,
invisible as individual acts but present as atmosphere — a quality of shared
authorship that the painting carries without advertising. Curated in
collaboration with Tiwani Contemporary, the exhibition was the artist’s most
ambitious commission to date and her first major solo presentation in the North
of England.

 

Speaking about the body of work, Prempeh has described drawing on the
traditions of magic realist literature — Haruki Murakami’s The Wind-up Bird
Chronicle and Gabriel García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude
among her touchstones — to playfully reimagine Hull, a city she encountered in
a fleeting but memorable way. For her, magic resides in the intangible aspects
of the human experience, in emotions that resist logic and in fleeting
connections. She has spoken of trying to reveal how the everyday carries quiet
mysteries, colliding time spent with inhabitants of the city with her own
personal encounters. Her approach, she explains, moves between the familiar and
the unfamiliar — an attempt to reframe a place through painting, projection,
and installation. We live, we endure, and we move on, she has said, but it is
the magic of these intangible layers that make a place unforgettable.

The work is also, crucially, not merely a painting. The Nearness of
Elsewhere exists as a complete installation: the canvas is accompanied by a
projection onto its surface in which things appear and disappear in real time.
The fire in the fireplace flickers into life. The shadow of the artist’s mother
moves through the living room, visible briefly and then gone — present the way
memory is present, intermittently, in the corner of vision. The work becomes
temporal as well as spatial, a painting that unfolds through duration. This is
not an embellishment. It is the work’s core proposition: that the past is not
behind us but beside us, that those we love occupy the same room we do, just at
a different frequency.

 

This dimension connects the work to Prempeh’s broader technical
signature. The starting point for her paintings is blackness — the tonal
properties of the colour establish the ground, creating a cinematic depth from
which figures, places, and memories emerge as if projected rather than painted.
Schlag metal, applied to selected areas, oxidises over time, creating slow,
live visual changes that animate the image and build a meta-narrative around
the passage of time and the instability of memory. The painting is never
exactly the same painting twice. It changes as the collection changes around
it, as the years pass, as the metal darkens or catches the light.

A Work of Tate-Level Significance

 

The Tate collection holds a work by Emma Prempeh acquired in 2025: What’s
Left? (2024), a horizontal diptych in oil, acrylic, oil stick, and schlag
metal measuring 100.5 × 341 cm. Its acquisition by one of the world’s most
authoritative modern and contemporary collections is a clear institutional
signal: Prempeh’s practice has reached a level of critical and historical
weight that warrants permanent museum holding. The Nearness of Elsewhere
belongs to that same tier.

The two works share the same defining qualities of Prempeh’s mature
practice: the large horizontal or near-square format that commands
architectural space; the use of schlag metal embedded in the painted surface,
creating a live material presence that evolves over time; the layering of
interior and exterior, domestic and landscape, personal and diasporic into a
single unified field; the deep cinematic ground built from blackness out of
which forms and memories emerge; and the structural ambition to make a painting
that operates simultaneously as narrative, atmosphere, and argument. In scale, The
Nearness of Elsewhere is comparable to What’s Left?; in technical
complexity and material range it is, if anything, more fully developed.

What elevates The Nearness of Elsewhere beyond comparison, and
makes it the more comprehensive statement of the two, is the integrated
projection component. Where What’s Left? is a painting of the highest
order, The Nearness of Elsewhere is a painting installation: the canvas
is inseparable from the projected imagery — the flickering fire, the shadow of
the artist’s mother passing through the room — that animates and extends it.
The work operates across time as well as space. It is, in the fullest sense, what
Prempeh has described as her most complete realisation of the relationship
between memory, place, and the intangible layers that make a place
unforgettable. That is what the Tate recognised in acquiring What’s Left?.
The Nearness of Elsewhere is a work of the same standing — and the one
that carries the fuller proposition.

 

The Case for Acquiring The Nearness of Elsewhere for
the Black Square Collection

This work was not simply available. It had been reserved for the Ferens
Art Museum in Hull, which ultimately selected a smaller-scale work due to
spatial constraints. The Nearness of Elsewhere then became acquirable only
because of Black Square’s relationships, responsiveness, and standing with
Tiwani Contemporary. That it is now in the collection is not routine. It speaks
directly to what Black Square is: an operation capable of sourcing works of
this stature before they disappear into institutional holdings for a
generation.

Emma Prempeh (b. 1996, London) is one of the most fully formed young
painters working in Britain today. She studied at Goldsmiths University,
graduating in 2019 with the Alumno/Space bursary award, then completed her MA
Painting at the Royal College of Art on a Leverhulme Trust Arts Scholarship,
winning the Valerie Beston Trust Arts Award in 2022. Her institutional
trajectory since graduation has been unusually accelerated. Her work is in the
collection of the Tate. She has shown at Gagosian as part of Ever So Present
II: Between Home and Elsewhere (Park & 75, New York, 2025) — one of the
most significant group show placements an emerging painter can receive.

 

She has shown twice at Perrotin in 2025 alone: in FEMMES, a group
exhibition curated by Pharrell Williams — Louis Vuitton’s Men’s Creative
Director — celebrating Black women artists across generations, where she
appeared alongside Carrie Mae Weems, Mickalene Thomas, Tschabalala Self, and
Betye Saar; and in Portals to Unwritten Time at Perrotin Marais. Her
Artfacts global ranking stands at 23,497 with an annual growth rate of 6.22%,
her UK ranking at 1,243 — steep upward trajectories reflecting both critical
and institutional momentum.

She is represented by Tiwani Contemporary, whose Cork Street gallery is
one of the most important platforms in London for artists of African and
diasporic practice. Her relationship with Perrotin — which included three shows
at the gallery in 2025 and a forthcoming solo exhibition in September 2026 —
signals a significant expansion of her institutional footprint into the global
blue-chip tier. A solo show at Perrotin places an artist inside one of the most
commercially and culturally powerful galleries in the contemporary world, with
spaces across Paris, New York, Hong Kong, Seoul, Tokyo, Shanghai, and Los
Angeles.

 

The thematic terrain Prempeh occupies — diasporic memory, ancestral time,
the interior as psychological and historical space, the instability of
belonging — sits at the centre of the most important conversations in
contemporary culture. It is the subject of the Tate’s acquisition programme, of
Gagosian’s curatorial choices, of Pharrell Williams’ editorial vision for
FEMMES. Prempeh is not following a trend; she is one of the artists generating
the terms of the conversation.

The Nearness of Elsewhere is the work through which all of these
threads resolve most fully. It is large-scale, technically ambitious,
conceptually coherent, and emotionally powerful. It comes with the projection
installation that is integral to its meaning. It was the anchor work of the
artist’s most significant commission to date. It was destined for a museum. For
Black Square to hold it is an exceptional outcome, and the kind of acquisition
— irreplaceable, historically significant, institutionally validated — that
defines what a serious collection is.