Emma Stibbon – Vanishing Point

Galerie Bastian presents the solo exhibition Vanishing Point by British artist Emma Stibbon, the gallery’s third exhibition of the artist’s work. Her body of new and recent works consists of watercolours, ink drawings and prints. Emma Stibbon depicts dynamic environments representing the extremes of nature. Her work explores both the elemental forces shaping landscapes and the impact of human intervention and its traces.

In Vanishing Point Stibbon’s focus is on the constructed, built landscape carrying the weight of history, set against a rapidly changing Polar environment. The work infers both the narrowing focus of a historical perspective and the literal disappearance of the Polar ice caps. In constructing her drawings and printed graphic works Stibbon’s concern is to imply the viewer: we are placed within the frame of vision. Confronted with the sheer face of an ice sheet in Ice Front I & II we become aware of an ever diminishing scale. Through her use of optical illusion and perspective we experience a fading out of view into the infinite nothingness of space.

Emma Stibbon was born in 1962 in Münster, Germany. She has taken part in several international residencies at the British School at Rome, the Grand Canyon and the Albers Foundation, amongst others. Stibbon was elected Royal Academician in 2013. She lives and works in Bristol. In Germany, her work has been included in several institutional exhibitions at Stadtmuseum Berlin, Kunsthalle Rostock, Villa Merkel, Esslingen and Sprengel Museum, Hanover, and is held in important museum collections such as the Stiftung Preußische Schlösser und Gärten and the Victoria & Albert Museum.