Emma Coyle

Emma Coyle raises issues of female beauty, identity and desirability through her Pop Art paintings of pale-skinned, posing fashionistas. With a Warholian focus on haute couture's surface beauty, Emma's work evokes glamour stripped of its sheen; she invites us to see these women with a more critical eye. The result is art which brightly parades its bold colors, spare composition and strong line. The facial features of her subjects are subsumed by their attitude, and are noteworthy mostly for their similarity--lips are all the same pulpy red, and similar eyes are lined by short but spiky lashes--as if these languid personas achieved full life only through their fashions. Emma has given these stylish women not identities so much as presented them in the varying roles that consumer society imposes on women.

Through subtle yet scathing irony, Emma Coyle's work provides a commentary about dictums on beauty, which are just as seductive and overpowering as the colors in which they are portrayed in these disarming works.