EMMA STERN

B. 1992 in New Jersey
Lives and works in Brooklyn, NY

Employing tools intended for game developers to create virtual female models, combined with traditional oil painting techniques- Stern utilizes avatars as her muse and subject. Stern’s hyperreal and often pastel colored works reflect the way women are coded in cyberspace, highlighting the dominance of male preference and biases in the digital realm.⁠ Persistent themes include subversion, perversion, fantasy, and a unique kind of off-brand feminism.

‘Stern’s avatar oil paintings have caught the eyes of the art world’s largest power-players. Her subversive take on figurative art techniques studied from Caravaggio and Michelangelo bridges the masters and the digital age in a pastel universe of voluptuous characters—all of whom embody sexual tropes and likenesses often found within Reddit’s NSFW chatrooms or hentai, a niche sub-genre of animated pornography that gets more internet searches than Obama, Marvel, or The New York Times. “I wanted to pull this visual vocabulary out of these weird little corners of the internet, and as soon as you render something on canvas with oil, there’s discourse surrounding it,” she says. “Now these conversations exist in the art world, whereas the subject matter had been stuck in Behance folders on DeviantArt.”

Born in a small town in New Jersey, Stern’s affinity for the internet was a matter of retaining sanity. She, like many RAWR xD pre-teens, turned to online communities for social connection, starting with NeoPets, the hyper-popular virtual pet community. Then, one day, tragedy struck. “My [NeoPets] account got deactivated after I said ‘anus’ in a chatroom; it was absolutely devastating,” she says. Stern then transitioned to MySpace, learned Adobe Photoshop, and developed a digital persona. She created a new life, one that was older, looked a bit different, and was definitely not from New Jersey. She laughs, “I filled in the gaps that didn't feel suited to my personal narrative [and] I just started writing my own. It's really not that much different than what I'm doing now, except I'm being more straightforward that these are avatars.”

Her avatars, or “Lava Babies,” were born out of circumstance. After enrolling at Pratt Institute for her B.F.A, Stern’s classical figure education centered on nude models, sometimes hopping onstage herself to pose for her contemporaries. But, to Stern, the process felt derivative. “I was just continuing on this 500-year-old tradition of dead white guys painting naked ladies. Where do I come into this? Where's my perspective in this? It wasn't until I graduated [from] art school and was struggling with the sudden loss of resources that happens when you leave an institution that I started to address that,” she explains. “I didn't have models coming to pose for me, so I started using this character design program to make my own muses.”

- Alexis Schwartz | W Magazine

Stern has been the subject of Solo Exhibitions at Almine Reck, Paris and Carl Kostyál, London. Recent Group Exhibitions include ‘Stockholm Sessions’, Carl Kostyál, Stockholm (2021); ‘Resting Point of Accommodation’, Almine Rech, Brussels (2021); ‘The Artist is Online’, Konig Gallery, Berlin (2021); ‘Friend Zone’, Half Gallery, New York (2021); ‘06’, PM/AM, London (2020); ‘Escapism’, Meredith Rosen Gallery, New York (2020) and ‘American Woman’, Allouche Benias Gallery, Athens, Greece.

Emma Stern lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. She holds a BFA from Pratt Institute’s School of Painting