FRIEZE NEW YORK 2023

For Frieze New York, Tiwani Contemporary presents new paintings by Emma Prempeh, a London-based, British artist with Ghanaian and Vincentian heritage.

Prempeh’s recent bodies of works explore interior spaces pictorially colliding with aspects of her personal history. She constructs environments around these spaces to physically grasp moments of familiarity, expectation and nostalgia. The works reflect on how one can simultaneously occupy different spatialities, intersecting the architectural, spiritual, supernatural, and transcendental realms.

The booth will comprise a suite of new paintings featuring light projections and a soundscape designed by the artist to create a semi-immersive, intimate spatial and sensorial experience. Several of the works on show were painted in Kampala, Uganda, and these works become almost an ethereal merge of all the spaces the artist calls home, linking the artist’s Caribbean upbringing, Ghanaian heritage and recent exploration of Uganda and its capital city. Prempeh graduated from Goldsmiths University of London in 2019, winning the Alumno/Space bursary award for 2020. She won first place for the Ingram Collection Purchase Prize and participated at Bloomberg New Contemporaries 2019.

Prempeh graduated with an MA Painting from the Royal College of Art under the LeverHulme Trust Arts Scholarship, winning the Valerie Beston Trust Arts award 2022. She was the inaugural Tiwani Contemporary artist in residence at G.A.S Foundation, Lagos, Nigeria, followed by a solo exhibition at the gallery’s Lagos space.