Following her debut New York exhibition last January, Emma Kathleen Hepburn Ferrer (Italy) has returned to Sapar Contemporary with a new body of work, The Unicorn and Other Creatures of Hope. In this new series, Ferrer turns her gaze to the unicorn — a creature whose mythology has traversed millennia, continents, and belief systems — as a vehicle for exploring ideas of liberty, captivity, purity, and transcendence. Drawing upon a decade-long fascination with The Unicorn Tapestries at The Met Cloisters, Ferrer reimagines the unicorn as a deeply spiritual being, a symbol both of sovereignty and sacrifice.

The Unicorn continues Ferrer’s exploration of ritual, mythology, and the sacred. Her paintings reinterpret Christian iconography through a universal lens. Living and working in Tuscany, Ferrer engages deeply with the Christian and pagan mythologies that saturate the European landscape. “Where before in my work there was melancholy, now there is mystery,” she reflects. “Where before there was tragedy, now there is a glimmer of hope.”

Ferrer, who shares her home and studio in the Apuan Alps with her two herding dogs, Orso and Lilla, also reflects on the various mundane occurrences in her village and community. She is strongly influenced by the profound isolation of her area, and the way that life therein summons a strong interdependence on one's fellow human and other creatures.

Emma Kathleen Hepburn Ferrer was born in Morges, Switzerland and grew up in Florence, Italy surrounded by the works of medieval and Renaissance artists. As a young adult, Ferrer spent six years in New York where she maintained a studio practice whilst working in art galleries as a curator and artist liaison. In 2021 she returned to her home in Camaiore, Italy, devoting herself to her art practice. There, reflecting on the remote beauty of her rural environment, she began investigating a complex relationship between humans, animals, and Nature, and the relationship of these to a higher power.

Early in her artistic career Ferrer pursued a classical education in drawing and painting. One of the youngest students ever accepted into the academy, at 18 years of age she enrolled in the Advanced Painting program at the Florence Academy of Art, a traditional atelier where she would be imbued in the techniques, methodologies, and theories of the old masters. There, Ferrer undertook exhaustive studies from life including still life and the live figure, studying human anatomy as well as becoming fluent in classical materials in drawing, painting, and sculpture. While she initially honed in on an extremely naturalistic way of portraying reality, working solely from life, Ferrer over the last decade has looked inward, greatly loosening her style and leading with an emotive and intuitive practice. Ferrer received her MFA from Central Saint Martins in London in 2024. Throughout the course of her education she has studied under and worked for artists such as Golucho and the maestro Ivan Theimer. She has curated the works of fashion designers Zac Posen and Manolo Blahnik, and artists such as Eugenio Pardini and Sofia Cacciapaglia. Ferrer holds significant admiration for the Quattrocento painters Piero della Francesca, Masaccio, and Paolo Uccello. As a young painter, Ferrer also spent extensive time in Spain where she discovered and began investigating the works of Francisco de Zurbaràn, Symbolist painter Julìo Romero de Torres, and Goya.