Based in New York City, artist Emily Ludwig Shaffer (1988) received a BFA from the Rhode Island School of Design in 2010 and a MFA from Columbia University in 2017. Ludwig Shaffer’s paintings and drawings explore the uncanny worlds that arise between idealised forms and environments and the frames through which we experience them. The artist new solo exhibition, entitled Five Ways to See, is currently on at the Peres Projects gallery in Milan. On display is a new series of highly graphic and colourful paintings in which the artist engages her distinctive hard-edge aesthetic and architectural sense of composition in an immersive examination of the sensorial potential of painting. Her clear lines, solid colour blocks, velvety layers of paint, and imperceptible brushwork give shape to a singular interpretation of an art-historical trope: the painterly and allegorical representation of the five senses.
Building upon Ludwig Shaffer’s long-standing visual exploration of the relationship between bodies and space, Touch, Sound, Smell, Taste (all 2024) and Sight (2023), the five large-format, near human-scale paintings that form the core of the show, pull the viewer into domestic and semi-enclosed spaces that appear simultaneously illusionistic and surreal. Playing with varying scales in Taste or textured surfaces in Touch and Sight, the paintings engage the viewer’s body, inviting them to come closer to observe the minute details of the compositions or, conversely, to step back and appreciate the works in their entirety. More often than not, the paintings are peopled by Shaffer’s signature stone figures. However, even when unpopulated, the works are never uninhabited. A pair of shoes left under a table or a Surf and Turf meal served in a miniature dining room act as proxies for the absent bodies and as conduits for the viewer to step into Shaffer’s imagined spaces (
While her smooth surfaces, razor-sharp shapes, and grid-like and cubic structures connect her work to a modernist and, to some extent, digital aesthetic, Shaffer often explores art and craft traditions predating the modern period. The exhibition draws inspiration from The Lady and the Unicorn (c. 1500). A polyptych tapestry from the late medieval period, the work depicts the five senses in the millefleur style typical of European late Middle Ages and Early Renaissance tapestry. The artist’s interest in medieval works is not new; The Book of the City of Ladies (c. 1405) by Christine de Pizan, for instance, inspired her 2022 solo exhibition at Peres Projects in Berlin. This manifests in paintings that defy a rationalist approach to the world and its representation, such as through distorted perspectives, with the artist favouring works that cultivate mystery and ambiguity (on through Aug 23). © superfuture
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Just to be clear – superfuture® is a design blog and not a political commentator. No surprise there. The scope of our content has always been global and borderless, however that can often mean covering projects in countries where we will not agree with the politics or actions of those countries. In a world that’s as screwed up as ever right now, the focus of our support is to those designers, architects and other creatives who aim to make the world a more liveable one – as opposed to people that try their hardest to destroy it. So if a project hits our desk and we like it based on its design credentials, we may choose to publish regardless of its location or creators nationality. superfuture® has always been inclusive and hopes for all current wars, aggression, violence, hate and extremism to end.
