Artist Profile — Emma Currie
Emma Currie is a Melbourne-based painter known for her distinctive style, which draws from the visual language of Cubism and reinterprets the historical female nude. While her practice is varied, she has recently expanded her exploration of the body by capturing close-cropped fragments of everyday interactions and fleeting moments.
Working on a small scale, Currie creates a sense of intimacy between painting and viewer, suggesting implied narratives that feel both familiar and elusive. Her compositions evoke a quiet tension, inviting reflections on themes of memory, nostalgia, and desire. Through these carefully framed pictorial fragments, she balances containment and expansiveness, transforming the personal into the universal.
Currie’s work has been exhibited both locally and internationally and is held in numerous private collections around the world.
Artist Statement – ‘You Open Always’
“This series of eight works traces the small, intimate gestures that live in the body — moments of touch and tenderness. Each piece is a soft study in longing, in the way we hold, reach, and remember. The title, drawn from a poem by E.E. Cummings, suggests a quiet undoing. The painted flowers echo this idea: they open and fade and are given and withdrawn, mirroring the vulnerability of the figurative poses. Rendered in muted tones, the paintings convey softness yet carry a quiet tension, their stillness edged with suspense. The close cropped compositions provoke subtle intrigue, implying a narrative just beyond our grasp.” - Emma Currie
