Weekend Long Reads

Emil Sands in conversation with Eleanor Nairne


On the occasion of Emil Sands’ first exhibition with Kasmin, the gallery hosted a public conversation between the artist and Eleanor Nairne, Keith L. and Katherine Sachs Curator and Head of Modern and Contemporary Art at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. Below, The Kasmin Review publishes their discussion, in which Sands describes the settings of his paintings, his interest in the body, and the relationship between his painting and writing. The conversation took place in the exhibition Emil Sands: Salt in the throat at 297 Tenth Avenue, New York, on January 9, 2025. It has been edited and condensed for clarity.

Eleanor Nairne: I thought we might start with the beautiful paradox of us all gathering here in January, on a freezing cold, midwinter night, around the blistering heat of beach paintings. Tell us a bit about what attracted you to making paintings of the beach?

Emil Sands: When this show was scheduled for January, I was excited because I wanted everyone to walk in and be blasted by summer heat and nakedness—everything that we’re not dealing with right now. In all my paintings the figure is central. These aren’t ideal bodies. They aren’t perfect, wonderful bodies. When I got to thinking about the exhibition, I wanted to set the work almost in a stage set, in a place where the body and its vulnerabilities are most on show. Our bodies are very central to the summer, and our naked bodies are on show in a way that we accept as normal. I wanted to use the idea of a summer’s day to create an atmosphere of vulnerability and exposure. The paintings focus on slight moments of charge that happen with the body.

Eleanor Nairne: One of the things that I find so compelling about your paintings is they have such serenity about them, but there’s always a degree of drama as well. Like you say, you take a minute with Uninhibited view (all artworks 2024) and you do think, why isn’t she wearing her trousers? Also, because you’ve got the tan line, it takes a minute before it registers (laughs). I think I also might have seen a version of this painting in which she was dressed.

Emil Sands: She was—she wasn’t always naked.

Eleanor Nairne: You’ve spent a lot of time dwelling with these figures, so it’s quite useful to tell people that the woman once looked otherwise to how she looks now. Sometimes, those of us who are not painters forget about how forgiving oil paint is, how much elasticity oil paint has within it to allow a painter to churn through different cycles of images or different nuances. So, when did you undress her, and why?

Emil Sands: It was my sort of final act. The majority of the time I was painting this work, she was dressed. I just felt there needed to be a moment of charge in the painting that set off everyone else. It’s very discombobulating that she has no pants on, no knickers on, and whoever these other figures are in relation to her are okay with that (laughs).

A lot of these paintings also have to do with looking. Who gets to see what? Who knows they’re being watched? There are a few paintings, like The invitation and Lawn party, where you have a real moment of direct address between the viewer and the figure in the painting. But in the majority of the paintings, you’re able to look completely unencumbered. A lot of the scenes are voyeuristic in that sense. And I’m really interested in that, I think so much about being looked at myself, being watched physically.

Eleanor Nairne: Well, that was one of the things I was going to say. It’s unusual to have so many backs in paintings. Traditionally, you’re never meant to put the back of a body on a poster or on a book cover, because people feel left out. A face is, in different ways, beckoning. And I think one of the things you manage to do with these, which is really interesting, is invert that. You’re looking at a back, but it’s still compelling. There’s something that sort of draws you in. In Tide pool crab land, it’s because the figure feels lost in its own little pool. In The last holiday, it’s because the figures are literally walking into the center of the painting. There’s something about these characters, there’s so much tension that you’ve managed to create between them. They seem quite fraught and lost in their own space. And yet, at the same time, I read that as some kind of conversation that needs to be had, but has yet to be had. 

What do you think makes you attracted to the body? You’ve been talking about vulnerability, and it is an incredibly vulnerable thing.

Emil Sands: I have a somewhat complex relationship with my own body. As a child, I was diagnosed with a mild form of cerebral palsy. When I was younger, my symptoms were far more pronounced than they are today. I had a pretty severe limp. I can’t really use my right hand. I grew up hyperconscious of what my body looked like in space, and we, as a family unit, decided to raise me as “normal” as possible. That served me really well in lots of ways. It also potentially engendered an obsession with what normal really means, and an obsession with looking at bodies, figuring them out. Why is his back right, but mine isn’t? It’s been an interesting process for me in the last two years, when I’ve begun to unravel my own thoughts about my body—my own ways of masking my disability and attempting to appear as normal as I possibly can for as long as I possibly can. So, I’m interested in the way someone’s hand falls on their hip because I’ve wiled away hours of my life, staring in the mirror and looking at how my hand falls on my hip, thinking, is someone going to notice something? Am I going to pass? 

Eleanor Nairne: The beach is peculiar because, on the one hand, it is a site of extreme self-exposure. But on the other hand, it’s a space where people lose themselves. When I look at these paintings, I find myself very interested in the question of time. There are certain occasions in life where we are more or less controlled by industrialized time. And “beach time” allows us to lose our grip on the exact moment of time. We have some sense of where the sun is, how likely or unlikely we are to burn, how hungry we are, but beyond that, it’s a space where we can allow time to flow in a different way. Do you think that’s part of what’s going on in these works, a sense of escapism?

Emil Sands: Totally. It’s also interesting that Uninhibited view is the first painting I made in this series, and Tide pool crab land is the last. They are doing very different things—time-wise, day-wise, heat-wise, body-wise, you know. As time moved on, my eye got lost in the thought of these locations. A lot of these places are places I’ve been, but most of them are deeply exaggerated. That has been the real fun of making this work.

Eleanor Nairne: One of the places that really comes to mind, particularly in The invitation, is the Hampstead Heath Ponds in North London. It’s a very special place—Alan Hollinghurst has written about the Men’s Pond, and so much has been written about the Women’s Pond as well. These are spaces where there is no phone signal. You are surrounded by trees that are many hundreds of years older than you, and there is a sense of bodies of every type and every description around you. Did you feel like you were bringing particular bits of the Norfolk coastline, or other places that you’ve visited, to bear when you were making these?

One of the things that I find so compelling about your paintings is they have such serenity about them, but there’s always a degree of drama as well. —Eleanor Nairne

Emil Sands: I didn’t necessarily realize this until I had seen them all together, finished in my studio. There’s a real sense of freedom and expansive openness in these paintings. But these are also spaces that, as a child, I was worried would betray me. I’ve walked on slippery rocks and been so nervous that I would fall while everyone else around me, my friend group, was laughing and splashing around. I would sort of nervously walk through this, unable to get the proper grasp, hearing my parents voice in my head saying, “Be careful, be careful, be careful.” And correctly so, because I fell over quite a lot. And so I think that there is a sense of a really exciting, open, expansive, free location in the paintings. There’s also a feeling of closeness to some of these places as well, in terms of the location. They’re places I’ve been, but places I’ve embellished and moved outwards. 

Eleanor Nairne: So, a sense of fear and jeopardy, but also freedom. All of these paintings were made in the United States, three-and-a-half-thousand miles away from where you grew up. This was also where painting kind of reignited for you, doing the programs at Yale, and being able to study both writing and painting at the same time. Was there something about being in the U.S. that made that feel possible?

Emil Sands: I wasn’t painting properly or writing at all until I moved here. I credit so much of this work, and my ability to work and feel free to work, to moving here. When I moved here, I hardly knew anyone. Moving somewhere new really releases you, and really gives you a total sense of freedom to make.

Eleanor Nairne: When you moved, you studied at Yale School of Art and Yale Creative Writing. Could you share a bit about your writing and how it sits alongside these paintings? 

Emil Sands: When I first moved to New York, The Atlantic published a personal essay I wrote about my body and my cerebral palsy. It was about growing up hyperconscious of my own body and everyone else’s bodies, and seeing normality, success and beauty as deeply interlinked, and finding myself looking through that window. And it was the first time I had ever shared any of those thoughts and opinions out loud. It was the first time I had spoken really honestly and openly with members of my family. It was the first time a lot of my friends had ever really been able to engage with the issues of my body. Now I’m reworking the essay into a book, and I have this very odd, split schedule. I wake up very early and write from seven until eleven. Then I’ll have lunch, and I’ll go to the studio from two until six. It’s a split day. 

Eleanor Nairne: I’ve been thinking about how your work has progressed since your last show in New York, at Tibor de Nagy Gallery in 2023. If I had an artist who I’d sit side by side with that work, I would put it with Gauguin. It had a kind of heat; it was about the impact and immediacy of mark making, but there was also a degree of exoticization within it. Some of that early work was inspired by things like frat hazing rituals, and it was interested in ideas of extremities, or the ways we push male bodies as rites of passage. Your work today, I would put it with Sorolla. This work is so slow and luscious, and so languid. When I think about that progression, I think you’ve really humanized the body in this time. I wonder whether that’s partly because, while you’re writing in the other half of the day, you’re making peace with bodies and feeling like you can unravel in your body.

Emil Sands: If my bodies seem more tender over that two year gap, it’s probably because I feel more tenderly towards my own. I used to hate the different ways that my body worked. And I don’t anymore. Don’t get me wrong—by no means do I love it, or particularly embrace it, for that matter. But I am more accepting of the facts of it.

Up until recently, I considered my painting and my writing to be deeply separate. But when The Atlantic essay first came out, I was surprised when a friend told me my painting and writing were interlinked. He pointed out that I paint bodies in very vulnerable states, and that’s exactly what the essay was about. I hadn’t ever considered them to be at all linked, but I’m grateful that he said that. Now I understand that, even if the day is very split, the thoughts do cross from morning to afternoon. And the work I’m making now is very influenced by my writing. They’re paintings that tell stories.

Emil Sands: Salt in the throat remains on view at 297 Tenth Avenue, New York, through February 15, 2025.


Emil Sands is a British-born painter and writer based in New York. He has staged solo exhibitions at JO-HS, Mexico City (2024) and Tibor de Nagy Gallery, New York (2023). He attended Central St. Martins and the University of Cambridge, followed by a Henry Fellowship at Yale School of Art and Yale Creative Writing. His memoir on growing up with cerebral palsy, extended from a personal essay first printed alongside his paintings in The Atlantic, will be published by Scribner (US) and Picador (UK) in 2026. Sands was included in Cultured Magazine’s annual Young Artists list in December 2024.

Eleanor Nairne is the Keith L and Katherine Sachs Curator and Head of Modern and Contemporary Art at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. Previously, she was the Senior Curator at Barbican Art Gallery, London, where her exhibitions included Basquiat: Boom for Real (2017), Lee Krasner: Living Colour (2019), Jean Dubuffet: Brutal Beauty (2021), Soheila Sokhanvari: Rebel Rebel (2022), Alice Neel: Hot Off The Griddle (2023) and Julianknxx: Chorus in Rememory of Flight (2023). Internationally, she has curated shows such as Erotic Abstraction: Eva Hesse / Hannah Wilke (2021) at the Acquavella Galleries in New York. From 2011-2015, she was Curator of the Artangel Collection at Tate, organising more than 30 exhibitions and displays across the UK. A regular catalogue contributor for institutions such as the Centre Pompidou in Paris and the Louisiana Museum in Denmark, she has written essays and reviews for The Art Newspaper, frieze, the London Review of Books andthe New York Times, among others.

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