Mark Emblem
Image Upon Image

The iconoclastic impulse often lurks in the sizable shadow of art. Even during the zealous making or gluttonous reception of images, somewhere a destructive desire lies in wait, ready to rise up and wreak creative havoc. It is all too human to negate, to tear down, to burn, to distort. The image – an unholy, insufficient echo of life – must be reminded that it is not what it depicts, that it does not stand above the life it seeks to convey. Energy is unleashed when an image disappears. But in art, is not the broken, the torn, the shard and fragment as communicative as any whole? And do we not treasure ruins and remains?

Mark Emblem – a British-born, Berlin-based artist – has been making uncomfortable, reduced, interrogating images since the late 1980s, but largely in private. The result of reduction and pressure – personal, conceptual and material – his aesthetic can be understood as both unforgiving and tender. For decades the artist chose to exhibit only sporadically, then not at all, although remaining art-involved. The exhibition ImageUponImage, 2026, thus represents an astonishing moment of unfolding, or making available again – an entrusting. Emblem’s images first appeared publicly on canvases in the 1990s in London after a belated stint at art school, then later in short films and videos (without beginnings, middles and ends), through reading-performances, and the writing of fragmentary theatrical texts. Finally, his artistic life became a covert operation. In this period, however, he went on to produce minimalist marker pen drawings, and his evocative creased, irregularly shaped, and crushed photographic works. 

The long-awaited solo exhibition, ImageUponImage, may include examples of pieces from these ongoing series adopting various material modalities. I write ‘may’ because, programmatically, the artist reserved the right to change the exhibition’s inventory until the last moment. ‘I don’t believe in permanence, in fixing anything,’ he told me. Exhibition texts like these are often charged with the role of edification or certainty, writing in the past for the future about an eternally important present. But here too, Emblem’s process and particularity produce a satisfying wrinkle in the norm. Thus the exhibition could (but may not) include Edding-marker drawings on transparent plastic sheets; bladed found Polaroids of family occasions sliced into vertical strips; or leaning ‘stacks’ – works composed of crumpled printouts or drawings in secondhand frames. Featured are scrunched-up photographic printouts on tracing paper entombed, sealed, and bonded using clear packing tape – the most un-high-art of materials. On display is a permanent state of transition, a fragile hold on place always in question. This will-o’-the-wisp work resonates both in spaces and psyches.  

In a recent conversation with the artist, I suggested that the exhibition might look as ‘if it had blown in from the street,’ to which the artist replied ‘yes.’ It became apparent that the negative wall space around his crumpled works might coagulate as an installation or situation entailing the least possible attachment. Although Emblem’s work reflects a deep engagement with the photographic image, he does not take still photographs himself. All of his images are recycled, reused, reclaimed, unearthed, or dug up. Grazing cattle, a posh house, and other faded bucolic scenes appear like disturbing hauntings. Is this a horror movie or paradise lost? Many works – but not all – utilise images personal to the artist’s biography – although I suspect that this is a knowing form of auto-fiction, rather than a strictly private matter. This is biography harnessed for art, not for its own sake, therapeutic, nostalgic, or otherwise. We also see past girlfriends, 1960s mothers, his own back, but also appropriated images from mid-last-century how-to books on photography – who are these models, these serene, ordinary faces? Memories are dislocated and pieced together in an incertum pattern. Despite their aching emotionality, there is also something deadly serious about Mark Emblem’s image-works. In his art, he never leaves a depiction alone. He revisits, crushes, discards, kicks away, unfolds, re-examines, repeats. Then suddenly these distressed everyday icons are transformed.  

Dominic Eichler