Alongside her recent exhibition, Moon Minds, at Silke Lindner, Emma Kohlmann spoke with Julia Shanker about the inspiration behind her work, the friends who have supported her, and her somewhat unconventional path to gallery representation.
When I first met Emma Kohlmann, she was coming off a whirlwind week: her opening at Silke Lindner, followed by press tours, parties, and a carousel of interviews. She tells me she feels a bit depleted, though nothing about her suggests so. Her brown hair is swept up in an oversized scrunchie that looks effortlessly editorial, and her blue-green eyes catch the sun like bits of sea glass, echoing the deep hue of her off-the-shoulder smock. We sit at a small café in Tribeca near the gallery, sipping on iced teas with lemon.
If life imitates art, Kohlmann reflects her own: she is airy, mythical, and wise. Her recent solo exhibition at Silke Lindner Gallery draws inspiration from Swedish artist Monica Sjöö’s The Great Cosmic Mother, which traces the origins of the world through a matriarchal lens. Kohlmann also takes inspiration from sacred springs in the UK and Ireland, where Neolithic people once gathered to give birth or heal. “I wonder what that is for us now,” she asked. “What are those rituals?”
Across watercolor grids and richly saturated canvases, Kohlmann fuses ancient iconography and folk traditions. Her flattened, patterned compositions evoke mosaics or quilts, speckled with lunar-faced figures that seem to hold a quiet, mischievous wisdom.
Kohlmann draws inspiration from artists and movements that bridge the intimate and the eternal. She recently saw a Louise Bourgeois retrospective in Tokyo and was struck by the psychological charge beneath Bourgeois’s forms, the way they hold something both tender and terrifying. Her shelves are filled with books on cave paintings and poetry, and she often returns to the fluid lines of Art Nouveau in her own work.
Kohlmann’s career path didn’t follow the typical Fine Art-Major-to-Ivy-League-MFA-to-Elite-gallery-representation playbook. She credits her success to the connections she’s made along her own way, though not the kind built on name-dropping or nepotism. “Networking isn’t really how I’d put it…cause I’m really like grossed out by that,” she told me. “You just have to be a good friend.”
Some of these pivotal friendships emerged from what Kohlmann calls the “DIY punk scene,” or the soft-grunge, pre-influencer, Tumblr era of the mid-2010s, when the internet felt more like a place to connect than to project. In these glory days, Kohlmann was decently active on Instagram, very active on Tumblr, but her career really started with zines.
After graduating from Hampshire College, Kohlmann began making zines in her apartment as a way to stay connected to her art and to her friends. She’d mail them to her best friends, mutual friends, and internet friends, until they began circulating beyond her circle, gathering a quiet cult following (one of these followers happened to be Maggier Rogers, who framed 10 of Kohlmann’s zines in her college dorm room at NYU). The drawings that filled Kohlmann’s zines, mostly sketched in pencil, were early versions of the figures that now animate her paintings: divine, non-gendered, and fabled, yet often infused with humor. As Maggie Rogers told Interview Magazine, her favorite featured “tiny sprightly figures who are riding dicks.”
Kohlmann sent one of these zines to a friend she met through Tumblr, an artist living in Los Angeles named Cali DeWitt. He loved it so much, he invited her to join a group show he was curating at V1 gallery in Copenhagen in 2016. This was Kohlmann’s first gallery show and it completely sold out. That same year later she was invited by the gallery to do a solo show. “And now I have this weird, established relationship in Copenhagen, which is like totally random and not what I expected,” she laughed. Since then, Kohlmann has exhibited 5 other shows at V1, three of them solo.
Silke Lindner, owner of Silke Lindner Gallery and a friend of Kohlmann’s, was also part of the zine scene, as were more than half of the artists she represents. Kohlmann is friends with most of them, too. One of her closest friends is Nina Hartmann, the sculptural painter and multimedia artist is also represented by Lindner. Kohlmann and Hartmann have been showing together for over 10 years.
When Kohlmann talks about her friends, her airy demeanor steadies with a quiet conviction. And when I ask her for advice, she repeats this affirmation, reminding me that these friendships must be real and not transactional. “You have to be supportive of your artist peers,” she tells me, “I see other people’s success as my own.”
When talking about her own work, Kohlmann becomes self-deprecatory. I can’t help but laugh when she tells me she doesn’t feel like a painter, as we stand before her five-foot Acrylic on linen titled Patchwork Piece #2. “ I feel like always relearning or teaching myself how to paint every time I step in or have a canvas in front of me,” she said.
Kohlmann prefers to paint with watercolor on paper, a practice she says feels playful: “ I am so into the ephemeral aspects of paper… and watercolor is a pretty fast medium for me. It’s okay to fuck up and then discard one,” she said, “I can make 50 in a day.”
When it comes to Kohlmann’s artistic process, she is not a perfectionist. Instead, she calls herself a “minimal maximalist.” She made hundreds of versions of each watercolor before curating the final exhibition. “It’s intuitive,” she says, “I don’t necessarily know what I am looking for, I just know what it is when I see it.”
In an age when wellness has been subsumed by consumerism, Kohlmann finds her own forms of renewal in hiking and forest bathing rather than red-light masks or raw milk. “The idea of wellness is like a façade,” she tells me. “Maybe wellness just means being good to other humans and being good to yourself.” Her work, she hopes, leaves viewers with the same question: What does it mean to feel whole? And what is the truest form of connection?
