Emma Labattaglia
Melbourne Australia, b. 1980
Biography
Emma Labattaglia is a contemporary artist whose practice explores memory, heritage, and personal history through richly layered abstract paintings. Educated in Fine Arts in both Melbourne and Italy, she draws upon a diverse cultural background to create works that investigate the ways in which identity is shaped by family, place, and lived experience.
Art has been a constant presence throughout her life. From an early age, she spent time observing her grandfather painting in his backyard studio, an experience that continues to inform her relationship with creativity and materiality. This connection to the past remains central to her work, where each painting becomes a reflection on memory, continuity, and transformation.
Collage plays a fundamental role in Labattaglia’s process. Fragments of canvas are layered, torn, reconstructed, and embedded within the surface, creating compositions that carry a sense of accumulated history. Through cycles of building, scraping back, and reworking, her paintings evolve intuitively, embracing imperfection as an essential part of their development.
Working primarily with oil paint, she creates textured surfaces that feel both physical and emotional. Dense passages of colour and material are often interrupted by delicate pastel marks, generating a dialogue between strength and fragility, permanence and transience. Recurring motifs such as tulips appear as subtle references to ancestry, growth, and the transmission of stories across generations.
Balancing abstraction with personal symbolism, Labattaglia’s paintings become spaces where memory is continually reconstructed. Through colour, texture, and layered forms, she explores the beauty of imperfection and the ways in which the past remains present within contemporary experience.
More information