Emma Beatrez

Hair+Nails is proud to present Candy Apple, Emma Beatrez’s third solo exhibition with the gallery and the second at our New York location.

In this suite of new oil paintings, Emma Beatrez continues her visual exploration of subconscious and overt symbolism and rituals inherent in our everyday lives. Drawing on her rural midwestern upbringing and the occult, Beatrez harnesses magic from the commonplace with a keen eye for the subtleties of gaze. These mesmerizing pictures evoke a dreamlike question where the answer rests perpetually on the tip of the tongue; ghostly images and ideas floating on the periphery of awareness. Traces of clarity surface through distortion and recontextualization of established iconography filtered through core psychoanalytic notions of the symbolic and the real.

While familiar themes from past work reemerge, Beatrez offers us new perspectives. The cheerleaders, carousels, chandeliers, and levitating figures feel at once more definitive and yet more visually tenuous. She knows these subjects well and we see the result of an evolution in her relationship and understanding of the concept and form. New motifs such as interiors where a lone figure seen from behind through a mirror reflection flanked by red candles, evokes a sense of melancholy and delicate innocence unsettling in its fragility. The viewer is implicated through their position as photographer, or apparition, or perhaps discoverer of a snapshot hidden long ago. The ephemeral nature of this and other scenes is reinforced by a hazy, diffuse palette that recedes and coalesces, built through meticulous application of many nuanced layers of paint dissolving into one another.

Beatrez has established a specific and delicate tone that is hard to put one’s finger on, an otherworldly, moody atmosphere that is something akin to midwest gothic. Candy Apple is tethered to previous bodies of work while pointing to new pathways forward.

Emma Beatrez (b. 1995, New Prague, MN) is an interdisciplinary artist based in Minneapolis. They graduated from Minneapolis College of Art and Design in 2020 with an MFA in Interdisciplinary Studio Art and received their BFA with an emphasis in painting at North Dakota State University in 2018. Beatrez is the co-founder/curator at Night Club gallery in St. Paul alongside artist Lee Noble. Solo shows include “Polyester” (Hair+Nails NY, 2025), “Device of Love” (Nemeth Art Center, Park Rapids, MN, 2024), “Technolust 3000” (Hair+Nails, Minneapolis, 2022), and “Quarter Turn” (Fierman Gallery, NYC, 2022). Other recent shows include a two-person show at LVL3 (Chicago), and group shows at Enari (Amsterdam), Nathalie Karg Gallery (NYC), Swivel Gallery (Brooklyn), Anthony Gallery (Chicago) and in collaboration with Lee Noble at the Weisman Art Museum (Minneapolis). Emma’s work is in the permanent collection of Walker Art Center and many prominent private collections. Emma Beatrez is represented by Hair+Nails Gallery, Minneapolis/NYC.