THE SIT DOWN
08: EMILIA MOMEN
Her early relationship with art education was uneasy. At school, rigid briefs left little room to explore, and while her A-level teachers proved formative and supportive, a foundation year at Camberwell had the opposite effect. For Momen, the abrasion was enough to push her away from the system altogether.
She left for Florence to study fashion, but painting never stopped. Crucially, however, before leaving she submitted an oil painting to the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition. A decision that proved catalytic. The work caught the attention of Ronchini Gallery, who kept tabs on her whilst she was in Florence studying fashion styling, but her focus drifted increasingly towards drawing and painting. Realising she was circling the wrong discipline, she enrolled at Charles Cecil Studios, drawn by its classical foundations. The environment was strict and prescriptive. Again, she found herself misaligned. She left, and this time, didn’t replace it with anything formal.
Instead, she worked alone. Painting alongside everything else, then eventually giving it her full attention. It was only after returning to London that everything converged. Shortly after, Ronchini offered her a first solo exhibition — an opportunity few encounter so early. She stepped into it with little sense of the scale of what was unfolding. That naivety, it seems, was a kind of protection.
Her first solo exhibition with Ronchini, Men About Town, was a quiet arrival that became anything but. The show was a success, and Momen found herself, in and amongst the spotlights of London’s established galleries. Having bypassed art school, much of that world was unfamiliar — and in hindsight, she’s glad she encountered it later, on her own terms.
Momen paints from photographs, which she stages and controls herself. Location, model, clothing, posture — each element is considered before a brush touches the surface. Working in oil on triple-primed linen, she insists on a smooth ground, removing resistance so the focus stays on form, light, and flesh. The process is deliberate, but the impulse behind it is intuitive: a rush of recognition sparked by a pose, a composition, a memory of another painting seen years before.
Her work is rooted in figurative painting, but the subject matter is personal rather than historical. Themes emerge not from theory, but from lived experience — particularly her experience of being a woman. In her ongoing Bathers series, Momen revisits a classical motif long entangled with eroticism and the male gaze. Initially, she didn’t read those references at all. It was only later, through research, that she realised how heavily sexualised the tradition had been. The distance is telling; she doesn’t paint women as passive or performative because she doesn’t see them that way.
As the series developed, so did her awareness of how women inhabit their bodies differently under observation. In works like Ladies by the Lake, the tension between ease and self-consciousness becomes palpable: some figures relaxed, others visibly contorted by learned ideas of beauty. Momen doesn’t instruct the viewer on what to see. She leaves space for interpretation, knowing that meaning is always filtered through experience.
Now London-based, Momen continues to build a practice that resists easy categorisation. Grounded in classical technique but shaped by independence, her work sits in quiet defiance of prescribed routes. If anything runs through it all, it’s control — not over how the work is received, but over how and why it is made.