Emma Fineman, Lambda (RYB), 2026, oil, encaustic, hessian, newsprint and charcoal on linen, triptych, overall: 90 3/4 x 153 3/4 in. (230 x 390.6 cm.) each: 90 3/4 x 51 1/4 in. (230.5 x 130.2 cm.)
May 19-June 24, 2026
Alexander Berggruen is pleased to present our first solo show with Emma Fineman. This exhibition will open Tuesday, May 19, 2026 with a 6-8 pm reception at the gallery (1018 Madison Avenue, Floor 3, New York, NY).
For her solo show Devotion, Emma Fineman presents a new body of psychological paintings where queerness is not exiled from divinity but placed at its very center. Grounded in materiality, Fineman’s symbolic, figurative works incorporate gestural brushstrokes, original prose texts, and thick surface textures.
Presented at Alexander Berggruen in New York, the exhibition comes just months after the Trump administration removed the Pride flag from Stonewall National Monument. Fineman centers motifs of hope and love, offering a celebration of queer liberation at a time when its expression is increasingly challenged. She posits that, despite enduring religious ostracism, few things are more holy than the purity of love born out of queerness, both towards self and others.
Though raised within Jewish mysticism, Fineman draws on a range of spiritual traditions. Developed in response to her recent work The Genesis Project, this exhibition explores universal themes drawn from varying biblical stories as an entry point to intuition, acceptance, self-assurance, and exploration. Often, the figures’ journeys lead to abundance, rendered through light and lush, fruitful scenes of the natural world. In her painting Low Hanging Fruit, Fineman repositions Eve as though she has stirred from a dream; her fixed focus on the apple becomes a conversation about desire as an usher to remembering knowledge lost in the waking. We see Eve rising from a celestial river, the pattern of which recurs throughout the exhibition, including in the sky in Lambda (RYB). Repeated forms such as these thread through the paintings, offering windows into alternative perspectives within a shared world.
Fineman develops a personal iconography by reconfiguring signs and symbols that recur across faiths and histories. The lambda—a Greek character associated with unity and queer liberation—is repositioned as a central motif throughout the exhibition. Depicted in the eponymous painting Lambda (RYB), Fineman situates the symbol within yonic forms referencing the devotional imagery of Madonnas. Turned on its side in Undercurrent the motif transforms into an all-seeing eye and appears again as a gathering of figural forms clustered behind a window in Ark.
Born and raised in the Bay Area, Fineman’s painterly structures recall the Bay Area Figurative Movement, particularly Richard Diebenkorn. Fineman balances the energetic vibrancy of vermilion against swathes of inky and mysterious wonder found in the depths of Phthalo green. She oscillates between ebullient and shadowed palettes, reflecting a journey toward embracing the full spectrum of the self. Through expressive applications of oil, encaustic, hessian, newsprint, and charcoal, Fineman conjures figures that are at once ghostly and monolithic.
Through gestures toward revisionist history and autobiography, Fineman opens a psychological space that engenders curiosity. Emerging from the space between representation and abstraction, Fineman’s intimate narratives encourage viewers to follow intuition into the reaches of their own most personal truths.
Press release by Kirsten Cave, adapted from the artist’s statement.
Emma Fineman in the studio. Photo: Julia Batavia
Emma Fineman (b. 1991, Berkeley, California) lives and works in London, UK. In 2018, she graduated with distinction as an MA in Painting from Royal College of Art, London, and graduated Magna Cum Laude with a BFA in Painting from Maryland Institute College of Art in 2013. Solo exhibitions have been held at Huxley-Parlour, London, UK; PUBLIC Gallery, London, UK. Her works have been included in group exhibitions at Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool, UK; South London Gallery, London, UK; East Wing Biennial 13, Courtauld Institute, London, UK; Alexander Berggruen, New York, NY; Galerie Isa, Mumbai, IN; Timothy Taylor, London, UK and New York, NY, and Eric Firestone Gallery, New York, NY.
Fineman’s works have been selected for several prestigious awards including the Presidential Fellowship Grant; Anderson Ranch Arts Center, Aspen, CO; Harley Open Judges Prize, Welbeck Estates, Harley Museum and Foundation, Nottingham, UK; the London Bronze Editions Prize; New American Paintings Pacific Coast Competition; and as a finalist for the Hopper Prize. She has been granted residencies at the Vermont Studio Center; Johnson, VT, Anderson Ranch Arts Center Residency Workshop, Snowmass, CO; Palazzo Monti Residency; Brescia, Italy; and The Porthmeor Studios, St Ives, UK, among others. Fineman has been included in publications such as Juxtapoz, Medium, Artforum, Hyperallergic, ArtMaze, and New American Paintings. Her work is held in numerous public collections, including The Cowen Collection, London UK; Hogan Lovells, London UK; Start Museum, Beijing CH; Martin Nielsen Collection, Aalborg DK; and White Space, Mordes Collection, West Palm Beach, FL.
On the occasion of Alexander Berggruen’s current exhibition Emma Fineman: Devotion (May 19-June 24, 2026), we’re pleased to share a video of the artist speaking about her work in her studio. Video by Dina Paola Rodriguez
On the occasion of Alexander Berggruen’s current exhibition Emma Fineman: Devotion (May 19-June 24, 2026), we’re pleased to share a video of the artist speaking about her work in her studio and at the gallery in New York. Video by Dina Paola Rodriguez
Emma’s first solo show at Alexander Berggruen in New York, on view through June 24, takes the joy of self-actualization as its subject. Much of it is rooted in the artist’s own journey towards self-acceptance as she slowly came to grips with her queer identity. She found that as she embraced her sexuality, her paintings got lighter too, fusing in streaks of vermillion over inky umbers and swathes of Phthalo green.
Although she was raised Jewish, Emma draws liberally from Christian mythology, particularly the Book of Genesis, to explore her own form of (self) creation myth, one in which women are not spurned for their desires, but celebrated. The resulting 18 paintings find bodies embracing, levitating, and bleeding into the warm color fields around them.
Below, Chloe and Emma get together before the show to talk about creative processes, late-in-life lesbianism, religious mythology, and prosthetic breastplates.
Emma: So this is my very first body of work since coming out, and I really wanted to create work about following my truth, my desire, my inner core, my gut, my intuition. I wanted to make a show that talks about the relationship of divinity to queerness because I think so much language separates those two things. Religion can ostracize queer people and separate that conversation. There is no more divine experience than the total encompassing love required to find and actualize yourself through the journey of queerness and share that love with another person. I really wanted to make a show speaking to that.
Chloe: There’s something very universal about your show. First of all, there’s way more color. I call it gay red in your paintings.
Emma: My favorite color, vermilion.
Chloe: That’s a new introduction in your work, which is so joyous. But I do feel like devotion to who someone is as a person—
Emma: —is such a universal thing. Definitely. It’s not just a show for gay people. In a lot of ways it is, but anyone can go on a journey of self-reckoning.
“In my paintings, I’m interested in creating work that can exist across time: paintings that are evocative of, and can communicate across, multiple moments in time. Clothing can be a very clear stamp on time that I don’t often find useful within the kind of world bending that I’m doing in my paintings. I feel like a body in flesh is able to exist anytime, anyplace, anywhere. ” — Emma Fineman
