Australian painter Martine Emdur is known for her oil paintings executed on a grand scale that take as their subject nude swimmers submerged under water. Emdur captures her homeland’s great love of water but takes the frame of reference away from the beach and instead presents timeless images of the human form enjoying expansive surfaces of uninterrupted water. The languid nudes surrender themselves to the ocean, their warm bodies juxtaposed against the cool water.
Central to Emdur’s work is scale; the large canvasses display the weightless human form in all its splendor, but also give it room to breathe in its state of complete immersion. Despite the remoteness of the underwater landscape, Emdur creates a participatory environment in each of her dreamlike images by blurring the lines between the subject and the viewer – we cannot help but become metaphorically submerged into the underwater oasis.
When taking two figures as her subject, the paintings take on a sensual overtone as the nude couple explore the water’s depths with reckless abandonment. There is a great freedom at the heart of Emdur’s compositions, which show each of her cast of figures touched by sunlight streaming through the water’s surface. Some works features deeper darker water lurking beneath and thus the body is seemingly suspended between two realms.
Emdur is a masterful oil painter, perfectly capturing the fluidity of her subject and the complexity of light distortions underwater. Largely self taught, the artist confesses to having an innate and incurable love of painting and has been painting water since her first solo show in Bondi, Sydney in 1997. Critical acclaim quickly followed and the artist has had regular solo shows at The Art House Gallery and most recently at Tim Olsen Gallery, Sydney. In 2003 Emdur was a finalist for the Archibald Prize and is the recipient of several awards including the Waverly Prize and Kings Prize.
