Emma Safir: Passionate Wretch

May 1–June 27, 2026

Artist-led Walkthrough: Thursday, April 30, 2026, 7PM

Opening Reception: Friday, May 1, 2026, 7-10PM

In Passionate Wretch, Emma Safir’s paintings tarry at the boundaries of privacy and presentation, interiority and reflection, temptation and rejection. Safir photographs textures—fences, blinds, water, leaves, fabric—and then physically works against them. Printed onto gauzy, semi-transparent fabrics, Safir smocks, beads, or upholsters the images over sculptural forms, burying them beneath layers of accumulated handiwork until they function less as pictures than as surfaces: pressured, adorned, and only partially visible. She calls the results paintings. Taking its title from an excerpt by William Blake, Passionate Wretch brings together two new bodies of work by Safir.

Among the Violets is a large-scale tapestry assembled from the scraps of fifteen years of studio practice. The fabrics from paintings, garments, and other remnants are pieced together through an intuitive, gestural process that owes more to Rosie Lee Tompkins's improvisational quilt making than to any strict geometric tradition. Areas of the tapestry are further embellished through smocking and other hand techniques, building up surface by obscuring what lies beneath, a decade and a half of images dissolving into color, texture, and compressed time.

In the Gilded Lily works (I–XIVVI), Safir UV prints photographs onto aluminum that she has worked using repoussé, drawing and hammering the material from the reverse side to produce a relief on its face. The result is a surface that catches light like a mirror but withholds reflections, its dimensionality an elusive trick.

Playing at the intersection of the handmade, the mechanical, and the virtual, Passionate Wretch stages a space—dark, expansive, alluring—to show how history, technology, and craft hide and reveal themselves in the present. In Passionate Wretch, the image isn't a starting point or an end. It's something to work against, work over, and ultimately work into the object itself.

About the Artist

Emma Safir makes paintings using fabric manipulation, lens-based media, smocking, rasterization, upholstery, and digitization. Her paintings function as screen simulations, proxies, and portals. Safir holds a BFA in Printmaking from RISD and an MFA in Painting and Printmaking from Yale. She has had solo exhibitions at HESSE FLATOW, Blade Study, Baxter St at CCNY, SHIN HAUS at Shin Gallery, and Bunker Projects, and has participated in group exhibitions at HESSE FLATOW, Galerie Nicolas Robert, Charles Moffett, Jack Barrett, and Lyles & King, among others. She lives and works in New York City.

About the Series
Emma Safir: Passionate Wretch is the second exhibition in The Real Deal, a two-year series of six solo exhibitions. Featuring Jova Lynne, Emma Safir, Lyndon Barrois Jr., Devin T. Mays, Megan Mi-Ai Lee, and Chris Curreri, the series examines the slippery space between objects and images—where sculptures behave like photographs, photographs refuse to stay flat, and materials shimmer with memory.

As Buffalo itself navigates the tension between legacy and reinvention, the artists in The Real Deal ask similar questions: How do we live among remnants? What does it mean to inherit a history? And what can be built from what's left behind?

Each artist in the series will present a solo exhibition, lead a workshop with BICA School, and engage in public conversations about process and practice.

The Buffalo Institute for Contemporary Art

On view