SLEAZE MAGAZINE
One year on with Emilia Momen
ROSIE LOWIT
“Tracey Emin following me on Instagram has to have been the highlight of my year!” painter Emilia Momen tells me as we sit down in her riverside studio. I first interviewed Emilia for Sleaze a year ago and we discussed the start of her career and being a young woman in the art world. Now twenty three, the artist speaks to me after being tipped as ‘one of the top 10 artists to invest in’ by Artelier Art Advisory.
Looking around the studio, it’s apparent that Emilia is moving away from her paintings of friends and lovers, which were a central focus of our conversation previously. She’s now working on a number of large-scale scenes. “My style has definitely changed a lot since we last spoke. I’m setting myself new targets, both in terms of subject and practice”, she tells me. One of her recent works is aptly titled Tracey Emin’s White Cube Dinner, and depicts just that. “A friend and I planned to go to the private view of Emin’s ‘I followed you to the end’”, Emilia explains, “and got the date wrong. Turning up a day early, we accidentally walked into her private dinner and Jay Jopling [founder of the White Cube], kindly set out two extra chairs at the table. It was surreal.” Emilia decided to immortalise the evening with a painting of her view from the end of the table. Her Tracey Emin’s White Cube Dinner recently won the 2025 Young Masters Woman Artist Award, an international initiative that spotlights emerging artists whose work responds to the art of the past. The piece was then purchased by an Art Foundation in Texas.
Emilia has since embarked on a number of artistic projects that explore this thematic shift, one of them a collaboration with the estate of late fashion photographer Jim Lee. She is translating parts of his photographs into oil, using her brush to soften the precision of the camera’s gaze. “George Seurat’s Bathers at Asnières is one of my favourite paintings”, she explains, when I ask what inspired this new venture. “As I learnt after being given access to the photographer’s archives, Jim Lee’s Bathers (1976) was based on this piece. I couldn’t focus on anything else until I’d turned his version back into a painting again, in my own style.” The result is a paradisal depiction of four women sunbathing on what appears to be a grassy cliff edge. In the background, one of them reclines against a tree. On the right hand side of the painting, another – in a candy striped two-piece bathing suit – is arched over as if about to dive into a sticky blue sea.
A marked departure from her intimate portraits, I ask Emilia how she approaches these works. During our last discussion, the artist explained that when painting the faces of loved ones, her pre-existing perceptions of them are almost immediately imbued onto her work. How, then, does she go about capturing subjects that have only ever existed through the eyes of another artist? “It’s not as different this way as you might think. In fact, it’s exciting because I place my own projection of who I think these people might be onto the pieces, and my own lived experiences still tend to shape the works, almost as if I know the subjects personally.”
Today Emilia’s studio is largely adorned with these multi-figured scenes, with the iconic Pink Man work and her initial friends and lovers series almost entirely sold. To the subjects themselves, I ask? Do they tend to purchase portraits of their own faces? “Very rarely! I had a surge of sales last week, so I asked one of the buyers how he came across my work, to which he replied that he had asked Chat GPT for suggestions of a ‘brilliant young European artist who is going places’, and I was included on a short list. It seems the robots are on my side!” And where did these paintings end up? “All over – Spain, Portugal, Switzerland, Ireland and the US.”
So, what’s next for Emilia? “My next solo show will be with Ronchini Gallery on Conduit Street in January. The overarching theme for the show is ‘bathers’; it was initially inspired by the Jim Lee photos and has now taken on a life of its own. I’ve organised my own shoots around London in places where grass meets water, so I have a lot of imagery to be working from. There will be 11 large scale paintings on show.” And after that? “We’ll see, I’d love an institutional show at some point!”
Keep an eye on Sleaze this time next year, when I hope to have conducted my third interview with Emilia!