Contemporary Art America
Artist spotlight | November 12, 2026 | Los Angeles
Emma Soucek: a surface that won't settle
In Sky Blue Life at Sebastian Gladstone, paper pulp makes color feel built, pressed and pulled apart. The Los Angeles exhibition offers a close look at a young painter's restless material.
Paper usually arrives ready to hold an image. Emma Soucek makes it become the image instead. Her paintings begin with paper reduced to pulp, then pressed and arranged across canvas. A color can be a strip, a ridge or a soft boundary where one passage gives way to another. Sky Blue Life, on view at Sebastian Gladstone in Los Angeles through December 15, asks what happens when a picture is built from material that has already lost one shape.
The installation photographs make the changes in scale useful. From across the room, the paintings hold together as bands, frames and intersecting paths. Closer photographs reveal surfaces that are uneven and fibrous. What first reads as a clean edge can look worked over, vulnerable to the next touch. That distance between the organized image and the uncertain surface is a good place to begin.
In Heavy metals, 2026, nested bands draw the eye toward a dark center. Diagonal lines cross that inward movement, turning the composition into something like a frame under tension. The gallery lists handmade paper pulp, acrylic paint, matte medium and gouache on canvas. These are not simply lines painted over a flat support: the material gives the crossing passages weight, and the surrounding colors feel compressed around them.
Impact, also from 2026, opens out differently. Blue passages meet orange, brown and pale vertical forms. Curves and straight edges interrupt one another without producing an easy division between figure and ground. The title suggests a collision, but the photograph does not show a single frozen event. It suggests forms that can still be rearranged. That is an interpretation of the image, not a claim about a story the artist has assigned to it.
Born in Long Beach in 1996, Soucek received her BFA from the Rhode Island School of Design in 2018. An earlier parrasch heijnen exhibition text describes her use of construction paper and commercial stationery, broken down and made into new compositions. Its account also connects her attention to color with Howardena Pindell, Sam Gilliam and Milton Avery. This history gives the pulp a meaning beyond texture: material already designed for one use becomes available for another.
The new exhibition text, by Akiko Neumann, places this body of work in California, where it was made, and connects its shifting states to ordinary intervals: a car, a radio in another room, the view of San Pablo Bay from a freeway. Those references need not become a key for decoding every mark. They make room for a quieter thought. A painting can carry the feeling of an afternoon without showing us what the afternoon looked like. Soucek's paper holds that possibility in a surface that never quite becomes smooth.
Emma Soucek: Sky Blue Life
Sebastian Gladstone, 6916 Santa Monica Boulevard, Los Angeles
November 6 to December 15, 2026
Wednesday to Saturday, 11am to 6pm. Check the gallery before traveling.
Official exhibition and images · Earlier process and biography. Checked November 12, 2026.
A source-based artist spotlight, not an in-person review. Work descriptions draw on the gallery's texts and published photographs; the interpretive framing is ICA America's.