Artist spotlight | November 6 to 9, 2026 | A young or lesser known artist doing something fresh, picked by us.

Emma Soucek

Paper is usually the thing a painting sits on. Emma Soucek makes it the painting's substance. She turns paper into pulp, presses it onto canvas and lets color become a surface you can almost feel through the screen. Sky Blue Life, opening at Sebastian Gladstone in Los Angeles on November 6, follows that process into a body of work made entirely in California.

Built from pulp

The work starts with an undoing. In the gallery's account of her 2021 show Edge Events, construction paper and commercial stationery are broken down into raw material before being pressed into another form. The pulp can be pinched, folded and spread. Its edges bleed together, while its ridges lift the image off the canvas. Painting and low relief meet in the same object.

That method has kept moving. The text for Feeling Tone in 2022 describes a loose underpainting followed by wet pulp, revision and physical compression. In Sky Blue Life, the gallery's new text by Akiko Neumann follows works that seem caught between breaking apart and coming back together. The slow making matters: the material is produced in the studio and worked onto the canvas over time.

Process sources: Edge Events, 2021, Feeling Tone, 2022, and Sky Blue Life, 2026.

California, reconstituted

Soucek is based between New York City and the Bay Area, according to the current exhibition text. This is her first body of work made fully in California. Neumann connects it to ordinary intervals: learning to drive, a radio playing in another room, the San Pablo Bay seen beside a freeway. These aren't landscape paintings in the usual sense. The interest is in what a place leaves behind in attention, color and material.

Our reason for picking Soucek now is the friction between an image and its construction. A color field can look airy until the torn-looking boundary or raised seam reminds you how much labor holds it together. The official posts below let you move between the whole painting and close views without treating the surface as a flat reproduction.

Before this show

Born in Long Beach in 1996, Soucek earned her BFA at the Rhode Island School of Design in 2018. Her earlier Los Angeles solo shows at parrasch heijnen include Edge Events in 2021 and Feeling Tone in 2022. Earlier this year, Sebastian Gladstone paired her paper-pulp paintings with Nevine Mahmoud's marble sculpture at Frieze Los Angeles. Those are different materials, but both ask what an image can do when touch and physical construction become part of how you read it.

Biography: parrasch heijnen. Fair presentation: Sebastian Gladstone, Frieze Los Angeles 2026.

Explore more views in the artist and gallery carousels above. Each caption links to its original post.