Simo Bacar is delighted to announce the opening of “Airneán”, a solo exhibition by Irish artist Emma Battlebury.

Emma Battlebury’s practice is grounded predominantly in the discipline of painting, through which she articulates a nuanced investigation into the temporal, spatial, and rhythmic dimensions that are particular to the formal and conceptual grammar of the medium. Her approach is notably informed by a poetic sensibility – one that does not merely seek aesthetic resonance, but rather engages with painting as a system of signs capable of enacting complex, layered experiences of time and space.

Where literary forms often employ narrative devices to guide the reader through a linear temporal arc, Battlebury’s work resists such singular trajectories. Instead, her paintings are constructed to embody a multiplicity of temporalities simultaneously. They do not unfold according to a fixed chronology; rather, they oscillate between immediacy and delay, coherence and fragmentation, inviting viewers to navigate a non-linear visual field that privileges sensation and multiplicity over resolution.

Central to her methodology is the intentional diffusion of compositional elements – gestural marks, symbolic motifs, and references drawn from both personal research and broader cultural sources. Through this process, she positions painting as a fragile yet potent apparatus: one that does not merely depict or reflect, but instead gathers, records, and transforms disparate fragments of visual and conceptual material. Her canvases operate as unstable archives, capable of both preserving and reconfiguring memory, influence, and affect into a singular, though never static, visual experience.

Emma Battlebury (b. 1994 Dublin) lives and works in Dublin. The artist graduated from the National College of Art & Design, School of Painting in 2019. This exhibition marks her first-ever solo presentation. 

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