Emma Ortiz

ATM Gallery is pleased to present Obsession, a solo exhibition of paintings by Emma Ortiz.

Obsession serves as a glimpse of what has fueled the imagination of Miami-based painter Emma Ortiz for the past nine months. This series of paintings, not unlike previous presentations from Ortiz, is highly focused on story telling through the use of bright colors and bold, but familiar, imagery. Highly personalized, the artist refers to every canvas as its own form of a diary entry; each one a vessel for fleeting emotions, thoughts, and even secrets from the day on which they were embellished with thick layers of oil paint. In preparation for her debut NYC solo exhibition, Ortiz actively collected tokens of nostalgia, love, and gratitude to bring focus to the beauty of uncertainty, becoming obsessed with the process.

Works such as Lily and Lupe, odes to the artist’s maternal and paternal grandmothers respectively, call back to the signature imagery Ortiz has been known to utilize: florals seen in fields of soft colors balanced between hazy patterns and backgrounds. Lily and Lupe are considerably more “traditional” works from Ortiz, in that they represent familial ties through use of color and plant matter as seen via the bent stem in Lupe, symbolic of a lost daughter, as well as the color scheme in Lily, reminiscent of Ortiz’s mother’s childhood bedroom, painted by grandmother Lily herself. Within the Obsession exhibition, we see more animals come into the fold with caterpillars, a swan, and a tiger taking stage.

Ortiz recalls the urge to depict more fauna in her work after a studio visit with the late Bill Brady back in November, 2022. The first inclination being a tiger, as seen in the work titled Sapphire. Tigers have been used historically to symbolize strength, protection, and immortality. Here we see the tiger gaze out across a sea of sapphire blue as a dark and stormy sky rolls in above. The tiger is the artist facing the unknown, at the ready, and the storm clouds are future challenges and tribulations that, while sometimes daunting, are essential to personal growth and fulfillment.

“When I began painting a professor of mine told me to become obsessed, so I did,” says Ortiz. These paintings are an escape into a world of Ortiz’s desire to tell a story greater than herself; “they allow me to project my world onto them for a brief moment in time, in an effort to better share the way I see the world, the only way I know how.”

Emma Ortiz (b. 1997) currently lives and works in Miami, FL. She received her BFA in Illustration from Parsons School of Design (2019) and her MFA in Painting from Florida International University (2022). Past solo and group exhibitions have been featured at Club Gallery, Miami, FL; The Bonnier Gallery, Miami, FL; Patricia and Phillip Frost Art Museum, Miami, FL; and Laundromat Art Space, Miami, FL.