Born 1999 | Lives and works in London, UK
Emily Gillbanks explores the intersection of analogue and digital experience through figurative painting. Her work reflects on mortality, memory and time. She engages with the idea of memento mori, while suggesting that the future can only be interpreted through the past, treating life itself as a form of living data.
Grounded in social realism, Gillbanks paints her subjects of self-portraits and her family and friends, all through the notion of technology – both at odds and indebted to it. She aims to push New Figurative painting forward, by connecting painting (as an act/genre) with spatial computing. With the presence of technology, Gillbanks is considering the in-person encounter when there’s also a cybergaze. She is interested in examining to what extent physical presence is not anymore being’s eminent mode, and has conceptualised quasi-Dasein, a virtual, seeming or partial way of feigning physical presence.
Gillbanks uses different levels of representation, combining traditional techniques with contemporary technologies. Prevalence with digital discourses in everyday life began her interest to the ontological ground and the way it returns to us through our ontically situated existence. This is based on the writings of Rilke and Heidegger, and Gillbanks believing the illusions depicted in her paintings are more honest for her being the creator. She contemplates how we can paint from life when screens have become representative and vernacular accounts of vision. The blank canvases serve her as similar screens, being surfaces onto which Gillbanks can project the modern life. She states as revealing her family in a manner which is not static but fleeting, performed.
At the age of 20, Gillbanks was the youngest person to receive an MA in Painting from the Royal College of Art, Battersea, London. She has been awarded The Fribourg Philanthropies Painting Prize and was the first artist in 2023 to complete both The Chargeurs Philanthropies Foundation’s Painting Residency in Marseille and the Daler-Rowney Artist Residency in Bracknell. At the Daler-Rowney Residency, she created bespoke oil hues in the colour laboratory. In 2024 and 2025, Gillbanks was shortlisted for the Herbert Smith Freehills Prize at the National Portrait Gallery. Gillbanks’ paintings are featured in the Daler-Rowney collection and other prestigious international art collections.