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Hadassah Emmerich’s surreal drawings and mural paintings are immersive dreams of the exotic. Their sheer scale is overwhelming and like a dream they haunt the viewer. Cliché fantasies of foreign beauties, ornaments, tropical plants and flowers are expressions of the artist’s exploration of her own nationality: Emmerich is Dutch, born to mixed race parents of German, Chinese and Indonesian origin. Following Sigmund Freud’s Interpretation of Dreams we can read Emmerich’s naïve and powerful fantasies about a place ‘elsewhere’ as an expression of the desire to reconnect with the repressed, as longings for Indonesia, her father’s country, which she visited for the first time in her early twenties. Yet, the paintings are no one-toone translations of the artist’s subconscious, but they are inquiries into the idea of the exotic. For the artist, dreams are the starting point, never the end product. Emmerich’s hypersensitive environments turn exaggeration and over-amplification into critical strategies of analysis. The references to woodcut, the traditional craft of so-called primitive art, and to the work of Paul Gauguin and Henri Rousseau are sometimes critical, often ironic and always celebratory comments on the representation of the exotic in art history.

A new catalogue will be presented, with texts by Mella Jaarsma, the artist and a foreword by Ambassador Dr. Nikolaos van Dam

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