EMILIA TELESE

(b. Italy 1973) is an artist living and working in Reykjavík, Iceland. She works in a variety of media from performance to printmaking, sound art to painting and installation. Emilia graduated from the painting program at the Fine Arts Academy in Florence, Italy in 1996 and subsequently moved to the UK, where she studied printmaking at Brighton University and completed a PhD at Loughborough University. She relocated to Iceland in 2019. Emilia has exhibited worldwide since 1994, with exhibition highlights including The Woolwich Contemporary Print Fair (London, 2023) Palazzo Grifoni (San Miniato, 2023) The Louvre Museum (Paris, 2012), The Venice Biennale (Venice, 2005), the Royal Festival Hall (London, 2012) Tate Britain (London 2009) Ars Electronica (Linz, 2002 – 2003) Chashama (New York, 2008) Centro Cultural Telemar (Rio de Janeiro, 2010) Leeds City Gallery and Museum (Leeds, 2010) The Brighton Festival (Brighton,1998 – 2004), The Association of Icelandic Printmakers‘ Gallery (Reykjavík, Iceland, 2022 – 2023) and more. She has been featured in the media in the UK, Italy, and Iceland such as, among others, the BBC, RÙV and RAI.

Emilia Telese’s large body of printmaking work since 1996 explores autobiography, abstract patterns, and the tension between static and performative mediums. Combining her Florentine training on Renaissance techniques with her practice as a conceptual artist over the past 25 years, Emilia Telese has created a series of printmaking works, charting emotional journeys about intimate life moments in Iceland and Italy. Her Nordic Landscape series depicts fragments and observation about Emilia’s life in Iceland, while her Progressive Decay series unites the rhythmic patterns present in industrial and domestic waste with meditations about the artist’s own life story. The artist uses inks she makes in her Reykjavík studio using Icelandic earth.

Telese plays on the contrast between the enduring nature of labour-intensive, heritage printmaking processes and the fleeting nature of everyday materials which appear throwaway, but in fact endure on Earth for centuries as part of the Earth’s industrial waste. On their surface, the weathered texture of the etchings reflects the fragility of life and the moments we capture with our mind’s eye, memories of the different stages of our existence made of lights and shadows.

Emilia Telese is represented by The Artists‘ Agency in the UK. She is a member of SíM (The Association of Icelandic Artists) and Íslensk Grafík (The Association of Icelandic Printmakers).