Rosie Lowit speaks with painter about her reworking of the art-historical bather, her stylistic influences, and her current exhibition at Ronchini Gallery.
Bathing emerged as a visual motif in Classical antiquity, with Praxiteles’ Aphrodite of Knidos (4th century BC) credited as the first life-sized depiction of the nude female form. The statue, portraying goddess Aphrodite preparing to bathe, is perhaps most often perceived as a symbol of the male gaze—and it is popularly believed that Praxiteles’ intention was for it to be seen through such a lens. From the point at which Aphrodite of Knidos established this canon, one that has permeated Western culture for over two thousand years, depictions of women bathing have penetrated every corner of art history.
Painter Emilia Momen was first drawn to the trope after coming across pioneering fashion photographer Jim Lee’s Bathers (1976) last year. Lee’s son gave Momen access to his father’s archives and she replicated the photograph in paint. “I didn’t have to alter anything about Bathers’ composition,” she tells me when we meet to discuss her recent body of work. “The photograph translated to oil so effectively and I later found out this was because, unlike most of his other works, it was directly influenced by a painting”—in this case, Georges Seurat’s Bathers at Asnières (1884). Momen’s exploration of Lee’s archive resulted in her 2024 series Bathers I, II and III.
This initial foray into the motif has culminated in the artist’s second solo show at London’s Ronchini Gallery. On until 26 February, Bathers comprises eleven paintings that respond to the subject matter as it has been portrayed throughout art history. In preparation for the body of work, she collected archival imagery that spanned works from Pierre-Auguste Renoir to Peter Doig, accruing a series of references across composition, form, and colour. From this process of collection, the artist began to reframe the canonical depiction of bathing—so often analysed in tandem with critique of the male gaze—through a gendered lens.
The artist wanted to disrupt patriarchal readings of the trope by granting her sitters agency to “move freely and adopt their own poses,” she says. By making this choice, Momen sought to present bathing as a quotidian but also freeing and self-affirming act. Bexhill Bather (2025) is a triumphant rendering of Cabanel’s 1863 Naissance de Vénus, but where Cabanel’s Venus reclines passively, exhibiting her sinuous figure yet shielding her eyes so as not to challenge the viewer’s gaze, Momen’s model is strong and sculpted, lifting her head resolutely towards the sun.
Despite the intention to present her sitters free of self-consciousness, the artist found—unsurprisingly—that many of them slipped into a learned performance during the shoots. “Their poses were truly reflective of how they feel about their bodies, and how they’d like others to perceive them,” she considers. I ask about Ladies by the Lake (2025): “Some think they look their best from a certain angle, and so adopted those stances. Others covered certain parts of their bodies with their arms.” Encouraging her models to disregard a male-centric perspective of their own anatomy proved concurrently challenging and reaffirming, perhaps an illustration of why Momen first approached the subject.
Ladies by the Lake responds to a lineage of bather works that have adopted familiar motifs and shaped them into a new visual language. For this painting, Momen was drawn to Picasso’s Les Demoiselles d’Avignon (1907), a depiction of five prostitutes that proved a marked departure from the allegorical and pastoral scenes that preceded it. She was equally inspired by contemporary artist Sahara Longe’s As We Are (After Otto Friedrich) (2024), which—while also a nod to Picasso—focused on shifting the gaze of Vienna Secession painter Otto Friedrich’s Wie sie sind (As they are). “I thought the composition was beautiful,” Momen explains, “women lined up in close proximity with a spectral figure on the end of the canvas. I had this in mind and then suggested my models echo the positions of the women in Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, so the final result was a combination of the two works.”
“As the series has progressed, I’ve become increasingly aware of how people act when they’re unclothed,” she continues, “and how vulnerable it makes them.” This line of thought prompted a series of nudes, the artist’s current focus. She began with a self-portrait, the completion of which became a challenge of not adhering to the same pressures she watched her sitters experience. “It’s an exposing painting, and I really struggled knowing that I didn’t have control of who was going to see it—or buy it.” She had to entirely separate her sense of self from the act of making, and solely record what she saw. In removing the conviction that the bathing trope inherently serves the male gaze, Momen has found that her works have become a celebration of the feminine body and its ability to freely move, feel, and be.
