Described by the Financial Times as “Britain’s greatest living stone sculptor”, Emily Young creates works that seem to exist outside conventional notions of time. Ancient in their sensibility yet unmistakably contemporary, her sculptures explore the relationship between nature and culture, humanity and the material world.
Young, who was raised in a cosmopolitan family of artists, writers and adventurers, developed an early fascination with art and history. Extensive travels across Asia, Africa, the Middle East, the Americas and China further broadened her understanding of the world’s artistic traditions.
Since turning to stone sculpture in the early 1980s, she has worked primarily with found stones, weathered fragments and material recovered from abandoned quarries. Rather than treating stone as a blank canvas, Young allows each piece to shape the work itself, responding to its geological history, fractures, veins, colours and imperfections. The resulting works connect the timescale of geology with the centuries-old history of sculpture and the immediacy of contemporary creation.
For The Timeless Gaze: Emily Young in Dialogue with the Old Masters at Frascione Gallery along via Maggio until December 12, five sculptures created especially for the exhibition are displayed alongside works by the Old Masters, including Francesco Furini’s Saint John the Baptist and Bernardo Strozzi’s Saint Catherine of Alexandria. Across different centuries and mediums, the works converge around questions of beauty, permanence, knowledge and memory.
Born in London in 1959, Young lives and works between Italy and the United Kingdom. Her work has been exhibited at the Victoria and Albert Museum, the Getty Center, the Whitworth and Salisbury Cathedral, as well as at the Venice Biennale, where her 2024 presentation received the Award for Sculpture and Installation.
