Emma Steinkraus constructs immersive exhibitions that treat art history as a living archive primed for excavation and transformation. Her paintings respond to sources ranging from the Northern Renaissance and Pre-Raphaelites to contemporary painters like Haley Josephs and Njideka Akunyili Crosby. Executed with technical rigor and in dreamlike color, she produces intricate compositions that examine art history, gender, and the more-than-human world. 

Her work is developed through extended research-based series. Impossible Garden assembles imagery by more than a hundred historical women artist-naturalists into a panoramic wallpaper landscape, making visible an overlooked transnational lineage. In Princess Botticelli, Steinkraus draws on Renaissance imagery, myths, and fairy tales to explore the porous boundary between humans and other species. Her current series, Pas de Deux, takes Ovid’s Metamorphoses as a point of departure. Paintings of dramatic transformations are surrounded by floating sculpted flowers that house art historical reference images, creating a visual dialogue between past and present.

Steinkraus’s work has been included in recent exhibitions at Carl Freedman Gallery, Margate; Edji Gallery, Brussels; 1969 Gallery, New York; Hashimoto Contemporary, Los Angeles; and the StadtPalais Museum, Stuttgart. She has received fellowships from the Oak Spring Garden Foundation and Vermont Studio Center, and participated in residencies at the Studios at MASS MoCA, Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, Ox-Bow, and the Blue Mountain Center, amongst others. She has been featured on the cover of New American Paintings, profiled in Burnaway, and named one of the fastest-growing ultra-contemporary artists on Artsy.