Emma Prempeh's Geographies of Memory

Among the emerging names in British painting, Emma Prempeh has built a practice in just a few years, recognizable for its ability to transform memory into image. Born in London to a family of Ghanaian origin, the artist explores the relationship between home, identity, and diaspora through paintings suspended between lived experience and internal reconstruction. With The Domain of the Stranger, her first solo exhibition at the Perrotin Gallery in Paris, she presents a new body of work dedicated to the places - both real and mental - of belonging. The title of the exhibition alludes to a condition rather than a place: that of those who live between different identities without fully belonging to any. Prempeh does not approach this theme through autobiographical narrative, but by constructing images that evoke memories, family ties, and interior landscapes. Silent rooms, barely sketched figures, windows open to the sea, and domestic details become fragments of an emotional geography in which memory matters more than current events. Prempeh's painting is distinguished by an intense palette and richly textured surfaces, capable of transforming any environment into a space suspended between presence and absence. As Brice Yonkeu observes in the essay accompanying the exhibition, her works refuse to answer the question "Where do you really come from?" They do not indicate a destination or a definitive origin, but linger on the threshold, on that uncertain territory where identities and memories continue to be redefined. The Domain of the Stranger thus paints the portrait of an artist who addresses the theme of belonging without offering unequivocal answers, allowing the images to narrate the complexity of contemporary experience.