Emi Avora

Emi Avora is a Singapore based artist. She was born in 1979 in Athens, Greece, grew up on the island of Corfu and studied in the UK. She holds a Bachelor in Fine Art from the Ruskin School of Arts, Oxford University, UK and a Masters in Fine Art from the Royal Academy Schools, London, UK. She participated in numerous solo and group shows in the UK, Greece, Germany and in the USA.

Elements from her upbringing in Corfu, a town that is a Unesco heritage site, inform her work: the memory of that strong Mediterranean light that brings clarity and strength to colour as well as the place’s special history and the remains of its colonial past.

Her paintings present encounters or ‘conversations’ between seemingly disparate objects or symbols. Sometimes dreamy, sometimes intense and with the use of light on the driving seat, her work employs a range of heightened palettes to allow the viewer space for re-invention, creating a gap between looking and making, between the real and the imaginary. By the act of re-imagining, Avora enters into an escapist realm albeit parallel to the real. Everyday observations blend into complex formations and become exaggerated through the use of colour and change of scale, focusing on what surprises her or grasps her attention. Reality is juxtaposed with mythology and observed situations are weaved into fictional compositions that allow a multitude of readings. Equally, the very process of her mark making opens up a platform to investigate painting’s power to transcend imagery by breaking it down to the basics of colour, shape, pattern and composition.