Emma Kohlmann
Moon Minds
September 5 - October 4, 2025
Opening Reception: Friday, September 5, 6-8pm
Silke Lindner is proud to announce its second solo exhibition with artist Emma Kohlmann. In a new suite of watercolors and paintings with custom stained frames, Emma Kohlmann expands her holistic cosmos that connects nature, animals, plants and humans in spiritual realms that speaks to the essence of the human psyche.
Informed by Monica Sjöö’s book The Great Cosmic Mother (1987), her recent work explores the concept of a pre-patriarchal, earth-based spirituality centered around the divine feminine. In a wider array of influences, her distinct visual language draws from ancient iconographies, markings of paleolithic cave walls, global folk art, mythologies, and the unfiltered rawness of contemporary DIY aesthetics.
In a large grid of new watercolors, Kohlmann’s non-hierarchical cosmos of flora, fauna and otherworldly creatures reads like an alphabet of signs and symbols, a glyph system excavated from a shared cultural memory. Arranged together, the individual works create a visual chorus, weaving together past and presence.
In two suites of new paintings, Kohlmann juxtaposes rich and deep earthy tones in one, and bright bold colors in another, with negative spaces of raw linen. In a group of densely structured paintings reminiscent of patterns found in mosaics, quilts or embroidery, Kohlmann’s flattened and outlined compositions of select pairings of colors on raw canvas are akin to wood cut prints or linoleum cuts. The same quality comes through in a set of paintings with larger fields of color, arranged flatly across raw linen surfaces with the fabric’s texture visible all around.
Like the face of the moon, Kohlmann’s characters carry an elusive wisdom, primordial and timeless. Their gazes seem to hold the cycles and connections that link all beings, the tides of history and spirit. Through depth and simplicity Moon Minds creates a tapestry of thought that tells a non-verbal story of interconnectedness and peaceful coexistence.
Emma Kohlmann (b. 1989 in The Bronx, NY) lives and works in Western Massachusetts. She received a B.A. from Hampshire College and has exhibited in the United States and internationally. She has had solo exhibitions at Silke Lindner (New York, NY), Cooper Cole, (Toronto, CA) Jack Hanley Gallery (New York, NY) and V1 (Copenhagen, DK). She has been included in numerous group exhibitions including shows at the Museum of Contemporary Art Tucson, (Tucson, AZ) Venus over Manhattan (New York, NY) and Andrew Edlin (New York, NY). Her work is in the collection of the Santa Barbara Museum of Art. She publishes her own zines, and frequently collaborates with artists, writers, musicians and designers, most recently she collaborated on a dishware series with HAY. She co-founded and co-runs Mundus Press with her sister Charlotte Kohlmann.