Painting the Now: Emma Coyle’s Contemporary Pop Language

Emma Coyle’s paintings transform the imagery of contemporary print culture into a bold, refined, and distinctly personal visual language. Drawing from the legacy of Pop Art while resisting nostalgia, her practice slows down the speed of media circulation through months of drawing, reduction, linework, and careful compositional decisions. Across vivid figurative paintings, large-scale canvases, and drawing-based works, Coyle treats color, scale, and contour as active forces rather than stylistic effects. Her work invites viewers to reconsider the contemporary image: not as something consumed quickly, but as something reconstructed, intensified, and given renewed physical presence through painting.

From ArtVanguard Editorial Team

Portrait of Emma Coyle

Artist Biography

[b. 1981 Dublin, Ireland] A mid-career artist, Coyle has been progressing her figurative paintings for over 20 years. As an avid reader, she has been inspired by many art genres over the years. Her current figurative work focuses on the use of current print magazine imagery and advertisements to produce painterly images of fine art quality. Her work combines primary and secondary line work with ideas of abstraction, minimalism, and the use of negative space.

Coyle has received numerous awards throughout her career. Most notably, she is a recipient of the International Art Market’s Gold List award, “Top International Contemporary Artist of Today,” and was named a “Recommended Artist to Invest in and to Be Inspired By.” In 2025, Coyle was awarded the Collectors Art Prize – Art Legends of Our Time by Contemporary Art Curators Magazine in Dubai, for artists whose art “has made a profound impact and is recognized as part of the living history of art.

Artist Statement

I produce strong imagery by working with carefully selected current advertising print media images, beginning with an extensive drawing period and continuing through to painting. I predominantly use large canvases to embrace the strong colours and line throughout my work. Through my style of painting, I mirror the present and reflect on past art movements. My paintings embody the power and strength of imagery, extending and contemporizing Pop Art.

Currently, I work within themes such as minimalism and abstraction. I see myself developing my work through the variety of contemporary media images I use, taking inspiration from 1960s NYC Pop Art and extending art historical movements.

Interview with Emma Coyle

Q1. You were born in Dublin, trained at the National College of Art and Design, and have been based in London since 2006. Looking back, how have these distinct cultural and artistic geographies shaped your visual sensibility and the painter you have become?

Dublin and London are two very different cities in terms of scale. With London being much greater in size, it means the multitude of galleries, museums and art spaces is extensive. Dublin was a fantastic city to study in back in the late 1990s and early 2000s. It really was a city for young people, and although we had a small number of contemporary galleries at the time, the quality of what was there was always impressive. Dublin was the perfect city to have as a starting point to learn about art history and contemporary art.

I started in 1998 studying sculpture, life drawing, ceramics, graphic design, and specialising in photography and painting by the early 2000s. I always mention the library in the National College, as it had a huge impact on me. I spent four years reading as many books as possible from one end of the library to the other.

When I moved to London in 2006, after many visits during my youth, I didn’t realise the impression the city would make on my art career. London has such a huge population consisting of so many people working within art and supporting artists. I have been very fortunate to meet and work with so many incredible individuals over the past twenty years.

An artist can work very hard in their studio, but to make an impact in the art world, we need the support of galleries, curators, writers, magazines and online platforms. London also has a very high standard of art galleries for contemporary art, and this has driven me to always work towards producing accomplished art.

Q2. Your work carries a conversation with Pop Art, but it also feels grounded in contemporary visual culture rather than retro nostalgia. Operating in an era dominated by digital screens and algorithmic feeds, how do you position your reliance on print media images in relation to both continuity with and departure from historic Pop Art?

In the past ten years, I have focused on making paintings for the “now,” using only current print media magazine images as my starting point. I am very much a fine artist and spend months working on preliminary drawings before picking up a paintbrush. My first visit to New York in the late 1990s had a big impact on me, and I was blown away by the art of the original 1960s Pop Art. Artists like Claes Oldenburg, Duane Hanson, and Roy Lichtenstein were a big influence on me. At the time, the art was only thirty years old at the most and felt very exciting and new. My current figurative paintings have a sense of 1960s Pop Art, as I use its theme of taking current print advertising as a starting point. To push this aspect further, I concentrate on my own style of line work, colour, and compositions.

Q3. Your process begins with an extensive period of drawing before moving into painting. What role does drawing play in translating an existing media image into your own visual language?

Preliminary work is very important to me. I collect hundreds of magazine images over several years and take these images and break them down through tracings and drawings over many months. I’m very interested in minimalism and abstraction, and I use linework to flatten images. I use primary lines to shape the form and secondary lines to add movement within each drawing. In a painting with eight figures, I can start with over one hundred drawings to choose from. The preliminary drawings that I do not use initially are kept for future paintings.

The Slice, 48x60inches, acrylic on canvas, 2025.jpg

Emma Coyle, The Slice, 2025, acrylic on canvas, 48 × 60 in.

Q4. Historically, commercial fashion photography and advertising operate through the lens of the male gaze, yet many of your paintings depict women who appear composed, stylish, and self-possessed. When you transform these sources into painting, how do you rethink the figure’s presence, agency, and relationship to the viewer?

I have always said that I leave the narrative of my paintings to the individual viewer. I consider the shape and form of a magazine image when I choose to convert it into a drawing. My large-scale paintings of the last few years contain more of a balance of male and female figures. This is largely due to the use of a wider variety of magazines for preliminary work. I continue to use only the preliminary drawings that are the strongest visually to produce paintings.

Q5. Alongside your canvas paintings, your practice has also included watercolor, photography, and ceramics. How do these different media, with their distinct tempos, surfaces, and tactile qualities, feed back into your core painting practice?

Artists always have many ideas within their studio practice. The more we work, the more ideas are created. I have ideas that would not be suited to painting in acrylic, so I use alternative art media that best narrate my ideas. I first started using watercolour and oil paint as an experiment into colour. I have been drawn to working in multiple art media, especially over the past five years. I print black-and-white photographs in my darkroom, and their themes relate to my love of abstraction. I have also been using clay to make a small body of figures over the past year, as I am interested in using print magazine images as a starting point to add expression to forms in a very crude way. Any medium you use is always relevant to your studio practice, which in turn feeds back ideas.

Emma Coyle, Untitled 2, 2024, watercolour on paper, 23 1/5 × 16 1/2 in.

Q6. Color is central to the visual impact of your work, especially in the contrast between muted pastel areas and bold graphic contours. How does color shape the emotional and structural energy of a painting beyond style or surface?

As a painter, my own individual palette is important to making my work recognisable. Artists’ colour palettes develop over years of hard work and dedication to painting. When reviewing your work after ten or twenty years, you can see the progression of your art through colour. I have always experimented with colour, and I bring a colour from one painting to the next as a starting point before mixing in other pigments. I have some paint pots that have not been cleaned out in over twenty years. As you mentioned, colour is a language in art, but also a medium to be pushed forward to develop your art.

Q7. With milestones including your exhibition at Helwaser Gallery in New York, the monograph Emma Coyle Pop Now published by Snap Collective in Paris, and international honors such as the Collectors Art Prize in Dubai, your work has reached a growing international audience. How do you navigate this increasing visibility while continuing to protect the independence and experimentation of your studio practice?

It is actually very simple because an artist’s audience is usually built up over decades; it is a slow, constant progression. I keep to myself and only use LinkedIn, as I am not keen on using social media. My working year is very structured. Work can be planned up to three years ahead, with changes being made over time to facilitate new ideas. The most important aspect is always the work itself. Once you focus on making your art, you can then progress your career in any direction you want.

Collection 23.1_Acrylic on canvas_ 2023_ 122x152cm300.jpg

Emma Coyle, Collection 23.1, 2023, acrylic on canvas, 60 × 48 in.

Emma_Coyle_25.02_acrylic on canvas_96x36inches_2025.jpg

Emma Coyle, 25.02, 2025, acrylic on canvas, 96 × 36 in.

Q8. Some of your recent works seem to expand beyond a single image and toward a more immersive encounter with the viewer. How do you think about the physical presence of painting in space?

As my work has developed into large-scale paintings using canvases that run up to ten metres in length, I have to think of the space my work occupies. Having an interest in artists like Katharina Grosse, Richard Serra, Michael Heizer, and James Rosenquist, scale has always been on my mind since I began painting. It has been a gradual progression over the past ten years because I must use scale in a very deliberate way. I cannot paint large paintings just for the sake of it; they must be paintings that are worked on to the same extent as my smaller paintings. This means more months of preliminary work and a much greater amount of time for completing a large-scale painting. I need to know that the painting will have impact from colour, composition, and linework, not just from scale. As I develop further over the next five to ten years, I look forward to experimenting with the use of individual spaces; for the moment, I am focused on the paintings themselves.

Collective Selection 4,5,6. Acrylic on canvas. 1000x160cm 380x63inches. 2025 [2].JPG

Emma Coyle, Collective Selection 4, 5, 6, 2025, acrylic on canvas, 63 × 380 in.

Emma Coyle, close up of Collective Selection 4, 5, 6, 2025, acrylic on canvas.

Q9. In works such as Collective Selection, you bring multiple figures together across an elongated, almost frieze-like canvas. How did this format develop, and what does the horizontal scale allow you to explore about rhythm, repetition, and the collective presence of the figures?

In 2018, I decided to work in larger 122 × 152 cm canvas formats with single figures, which worked out well. Then in 2022, I stopped to evaluate my work, and again, expanding on scale was a big part of that equation. Scale has been a gradual development for me over the past ten years, whether it be in height or length. I have never been afraid to push my paintings in their development. Sometimes I need to take six months to focus on preliminary drawings, or one year to focus on just one painting. At this stage, the jump to using ten-meter-long canvases was a natural progression. The scale changes how you treat your preliminary work, and how I paint these larger paintings is done in sections. Each figure is treated individually before being combined on a canvas. For Collective Selection 3, I wanted to make a painting that had a big impact in a space. And again, leaving the narrative to the viewer, I concentrated on my three most important aspects: colour, line, and composition.

Emma_Coyle_Collective Selection [3]_964x160cm_380x63inches_2024.jpg

Emma Coyle, Collective Selection 3, 2025, acrylic on canvas, 63 × 380 in.

Q10. In Untitled 9, the line feels looser, immediate, and spontaneous. What role do these monochrome or drawing-based works play in your broader studio practice, and how do these different modes of working speak to one another?

My large-scale drawings in their preliminary stage are the same as my paintings. However, when I had the idea to make large drawings, I wanted to be freer on the surface. I wanted to attack the paper with drawing materials. Working large is physical, and instead of spending months on one painting, I wanted to do the opposite and complete the drawing, or at least each individual figure, within a few hours. I used graphite, my own handmade charcoal, pastels, and pencils for these drawings. The drawings are as relevant as my paintings; I have just changed the physical approach.

Emma Coyle, Untitled 9, 2025, charcoal, pencil, Conté, graphite, and oil pastel, 59.1 × 112.2 in.

Q11. With more than two decades of commitment to painting, what guidance would you offer to younger painters who are still searching for their own voice, discipline, and long-term direction?

Work hard and educate yourself in art by reading and going to as many exhibitions as possible each year. The most important aspect of being an artist will always be your art. If you are not happy with what you are producing or how you are progressing, work even harder and push through to the next stage. Being an artist is a lifelong dedication, and hard work will always pay off.

Q12. Looking ahead, what questions are you most interested in pursuing next in your painting practice, whether through scale, subject matter, media imagery, or new forms of presentation?

I am currently working on preliminary work for a new large-scale painting of fruit and vegetables. Small-scale paintings, drawings, and photographs have already been completed, but I would like to do another six to twelve months of preliminary work. I want to take the approach of using small-scale drawings to produce large-scale contemporary paintings using a very traditional theme: still life.

August, 2026 | ArtVanguard Editorial Team