Emma Talbot; The Age / L'Età

Fri. 22 Sep. – Sat. 2 Dec. 2023

Opening Friday 22 Sep. 6pm with an artist’s led tour of the exhibition.

The Model is delighted to present Emma Talbot’s The Age / L’Età. Talbot, who was born in Stourbridge, UK in 1969, won the eighth edition of the Max Mara Art Prize for Women in 2021, and was one of the highlights of The Milk of Dreams at the Venice Biennale, 2022.

The Age / L’Età comprises animation, free-hanging painted silk panels, three-dimensional work and drawings. The work explores themes of representation and ageing, power and governance, as well as attitudes towards nature. Talbot imagines a future environment where humankind encounters the disastrous consequences of late capitalism and must look towards more ancient and holistic ways of crafting and belonging – that rethink power structures and celebrate the natural world – in order to survive.

The Age / L’Età takes Gustav Klimt’s painting Three Ages of Woman, 1905, as its starting point. Klimt depicts an elderly woman holding her head in an expression of apparent shame. Talbot reimagines this elderly figure as a woman with agency who must overcome a series of trials similar to The Twelve Labours of Hercules. Rather than overcoming the trials through destruction, theft, deceit and murder (as did Hercules), the protagonist employs productive, care-centred and practical solutions, inspired by the twelve principles of permaculture, a practice which offers an ethical, sustainable way of living with the land. Through her modern-day trials, the protagonist has the potential to reconstruct contemporary society, countering prevalent negative attitudes to ageing, power and the climate crisis.