Emily Mae Smith

Emily Mae Smith is an American painter who uses slick imagery with a cartoon aesthetic to question the canon of art history from her distinct and feminist perspective. Bodies are amplified and simplified, the artist often includes a curvaceous and thoughtful broom, an avatar that stands in for women’s labour, a phallus and a self-portrait of the artist. In Breaking Eggs, 2014, photo realistically rendered eggshells are piled up on a black ground, itself framed by a cartoon mouth and moustache. In Rogue Wave, 2016 a stylised liquid wave fills the frame and is reflected in the round glasses of the calm watching ‘woman’, perhaps another simplified stand in for the artist? In a similarly monumentally scaled painting of a single gold apple, Eve, 2018, a waterdrop covered apple sits in an empty space. A pair of lips anthropomorphise it into a potent and transgressive object.