Emma Kohlmann

The Messenger

The Messenger
A solo exhibition by Emma Kohlmann
V1 Gallery | August 21 – September 26, 2026

Malak
Essay on Emma Kohlmann by Emma Rosenzweig

I.
The trunk of the tree is red, the leaves yellow, the faces blue. Everything grows from the same trunk, nourished by the liquid from the earth. A snake encircles the entire scene, as though the slick creature were keeping watch over the green sky that has envelopped the planet on which this tree has chosen to grow. Perhaps the bark, the branches, has just been on fire. Perhaps the faces emerging at the tips are some kind of extraterrestrial being—an angel returned to humanity at a moment when something other than what humanity itself has been able to accomplish is needed. A messenger?

II.
If we are to speak of angels, we must look closely at all that has been hidden away over the centuries. Although most people associate angels with religious scripture, it is in the apocryphal texts that we come to know these beings most intimately. It is in the hidden recesses of the human mind that angels have taken up residence, leaving no trace of their passing. And everyone knows that one of the most beautiful things about angels is that they cannot be separated from those who have encountered them. They belong to all the so-called gods, but they are just as tied to those of us who are not gods. For it is we who have seen them, we who have spoken of them, depicted them, believed in them throughout the ages.

III.
When I think of Emma Kohlmann's paintings, I see a red sky. A sun melting the world I know. People are no longer made of flesh and blood. They are blue shadows following the animals that remain. In Kohlmann's paintings, something has always just happened, and it’s in that instant, just after the moment, that we are invited to linger.

IV.
My grandmother had begun to forget long before we knew she was ill. At first, she forgot what was closest to her: things that had only just happened, people she had known for no more than ten or twenty years. Sitting beside her was like sitting with someone I knew, who was breathing,yet lived in a reality no one else could see. A few years later, she moved into a care home for people with Alzheimer's. Her room was opposite that of an old friend who had also forgotten the world they had once inhabited together. Now they ate lunch together in the dining hall, watched television together in the common room, talked together, never knowing that they had once loved one another.

V.
In the earliest of the secret texts, angels and devils mingle with one another. Only later were good and evil set against each other as opposites; in the beginning, it was impossible to tell one from the other. Lucifer was known as the Morning Star, the Light-Bearer. There was no telling where a given angel's allegiance lay—whether with the saving God or the devouring demon. But why should it matter? Angels were messengers. Their nature lay not in who they were, but in what they did.

VI.
Emma is visited by a bear cub. She sends me a photograph taken from the window of the house she shares with her sister in Massachusetts. The bear leans over a garden table where a large bag of birdseed sits. “Flyer's Choice”, the bag reads. It buries its entire head inside, eating while the bag trembles up and down. The bear is dark brown, its paws enormous, already hinting at the size it will one day grow into. A few days later, Emma writes to me: “I really want the bear to stay. He's so sweet and lonely.” A few days pass. The next time I hear from her, she writes that she finds it difficult to see the point of making art when the world is so full of meaninglessness.

VII.
Once, when I visited my grandmother, she looked at me with kind eyes and asked if we had once gone for walks together, telling each other about how we hoped our lives would unfold. I said yes, though I wasn't sure whether she thought I was someone else. I had been a child when we took most of those walks, and my own memories of childhood had vanished too, just as my grandmother's had. What I remembered was simply her: her smell, her extraordinary fascination with angels, all her books, the smell of the books, which was like the smell of her, the cold tiles in her kitchen, the tins of smoked fish I always ate when I visited, her bathtub, her thatched roof, the long afternoon naps, the silence, the wood-burning stove.

VIII.
When Walter Benjamin writes about Paul Klee's Angelus Novus, he describes an angel whose face is turned towards the past and whose back is turned towards the future. Where we see a chain of events, Benjamin writes, the angel sees a single catastrophe: wreckage piling up at its feet. The angel longs to remain, to awaken the dead and make whole what has been shattered. But a storm blows from Paradise, catching in its wings with such force that it can no longer fold them. The storm drives the angel into the future, to which its back is turned, while the wreckage before it rises towards the sky. Benjamin writes: "This storm is what we call progress."

IX.
A yellow cave. The people are no longer people. They sleep. They dream. Everything is still. Only the sound of a moth that has just found its way out can be heard like a whispering echo.The tiny beings can barely fit inside their cocoons. Ochre yellow. Cobalt blue. Blood red. Moss green. An aura shimmers around them as they lie there, suspended in their dormant state. Two sharp black diagonal lines separate them, like the steps of a staircase on which they can stand and gently sway back and forth.They have nothing left to say. Everything has already been said. Some cover their sex with their hands; others fold their hands together or reach out, as though towards something. Their feet balance on a knife's edge, but there is no danger anymore.

X.
Noam and Amalie are hosting a Passover Seder, and since Emma is in Denmark, I invite her to join us. Around the table, everyone is trying to remember how to celebrate this tradition, which survives only as scattered fragments of childhood memories, as though each of us were sitting before a jigsaw puzzle whose pieces belong to our respective lives, patiently fitting them together to create, for one evening, a shared blue sky. Katja's father is ninety-two. He has brought the Haggadah his parents gave him when he was a small child, the one they opened every year until, one year, they opened it no longer. I read aloud from it, though I know very little about it myself. Everyone tries to recall the Ten Plagues. We sing some of the songs in the book. Emma tells us about a counting song she has always sung with her family. Soon we are all singing along, though it is Emma who leads us.

Then Katja's father suddenly remembers a song he has not sung since he was four years old: the very same song Emma has just taught us, only in Danish. We find it in the Haggadah and sing it together, this time in Danish. The narrator’s father bought a goat. The goat is eaten by the cat. The dog eats the cat that ate the goat. The dog is beaten with a stick. The stick is consumed by fire. Water comes and extinguishes the fire. Then an ox arrives and drinks the water, only for a butcher to appear and slaughter the ox.

At last, the Angel of Death arrives and kills the butcher. But then the Holy One drives away the Angel of Death, and we find ourselves back where the song began, with the father buying the little goat. Katja's father's voice has almost disappeared. It is faint, barely more than a whisper, yet it is clear that he loves to sing. Sometimes, if you are lucky, you find yourself seated at a table with several angels at once.

XI.
In Emma's paintings, people become animals, and animals become people. Objects are always animate. There is an inwardness to all her beings, as though language itself had been turned inside out. The language Emma's beings speak unfolds within their bodies. It reverberates like wings inside a cave, like lungs expanding with breath, like blood coursing through veins. Events accumulate, one upon another. Fragments. Shards. Like a song.

XII.
In the hospital that also became my grandmother's home before she died, my grandfather had brought the books she loved most and arranged them on a bookcase where they could all stand together. He had also brought a small dining table, some of her chairs, and the radio that always played classical music. The radio, the chairs, the bookcase, the books, all remembered better than my grandmother did. They held the shell of her body within the rituals of her former life, like an echo she could still step into. From the shelves, all her books about angels looked back at her. They watched her movements. They kept vigil with their backs turned.

XIII.
Paul Klee's angel from 1920 bears little resemblance to the angels we usually imagine. Emma has been to the Jewish Museum and sends me a photograph of the work. The angel has brown eyes and curly hair. Its wings resemble hands pointing upwards; its teeth are as sharp as those of an angry animal. In fact, the angel reminds me a little of my youngest child, who loves animals more than anything else and is quite taken with Emma. Every now and then he mentions her: "Mum, do you remember when Emma carried me on her shoulders at the beach?" An angel is an entrance into the imagination. An angel is imagination itself. Perhaps all of this has already happened. Perhaps it is still to come.

XIV.
There is no tangible proof that angels exist. There are only the countless stories told by those who have encountered them along the way. In 1903, the Finnish artist Hugo Simberg paintedThe Wounded Angel: a child. She is dressed in white. One of her wings is bleeding. She sits on a stretcher, one hand gripping its edge, the other holding a bouquet of flowers. A white bandage covers her eyes. Two boys carry her across a yellow meadow. One turns to meet the viewer's gaze, his expression heavy with sorrow. Behind them, a river drifts towards the sea, while on the horizon the mountains recede behind a veil of mist. It is said that, in one of the many preparatory sketches Simberg made for the painting, the angel is carried not by two boys but by two devil-like figures. My grandmother once wrote a book entitledAngels Don't Cry. In it, an angel throws a stone at the head of a child who has just lost its mother.

XV.
Emma sends me another photograph of her grandmother. Of all the photographs we have exchanged over the eight years we have known each other, I think I have received more pictures of her than of anyone else—apart from Emma's paintings themselves. She has white hair, the most beautiful eyes, an extraordinary sense of style, and she exercises every day. Emma and her sister call her Omi. She turns one hundred and two in September.

In the apocryphal texts, angels are described as both fiery and weightless. They have wings, or they have horns. They fall, or they fly. They are blue with dots. They are animals. They are faces. They are insects. They are silhouettes. I do not believe in God, but I believe in angels. And if they sing, I want to learn their songs. I do not know what message they have come to bring. But I listen. I look. Even when I cannot tell whether what has been painted bears witness to what has just happened, or to what is about to happen.