Emma Webster

Emma Webster was born in 1989 in Encinitas, California, and is described in gallery and press materials as a British-American painter who lives and works in Los Angeles. She attended a summer session at the Slade School of Fine Art in London in 2009, earned a BA in Art Practice from Stanford University in 2011, and completed an MFA in Painting at Yale University in 2018.

Webster's paintings grow out of an unusual working method: she constructs small staged dioramas and uses virtual reality tools to build and light imagined terrain, then paints from those constructed scenes in oil, producing landscapes that read as ethereal, dreamlike, and often quietly unsettling. Her debut solo exhibition, Arcadia, opened at Diane Rosenstein Gallery in Los Angeles in 2019. Subsequent solo shows followed in rapid succession: Green Iscariot at Alexander Berggruen in New York in 2021, Illuminarium at Perrotin's Dosan Park space in Seoul in 2022, The Engine of Beasts at Perrotin in Paris in 2024, and Vapors at Perrotin in Hong Kong in 2025. She joined Petzel in New York, where she held the solo show That Thought Might Think in 2025 and opened Rues and Leaves Themselves Alone in the spring of 2026. A further solo exhibition at Jeffrey Deitch in Los Angeles is scheduled for February 2027.

In 2022 she received the Jericho Fellowship in Venice, Italy, her most clearly documented honor to date.

Writers covering Webster consistently frame her practice as a fusion of a much older sublime and pastoral landscape tradition with distinctly contemporary tools. Ocula describes her as known for "ethereal, dreamlike vistas painted from miniature dioramas and virtual reality simulations," and Artsy characterizes her landscapes as work that transports viewers into fictional, otherworldly realms. The critical throughline is process as subject: the diorama building, the digital staging, and the eventual return to oil paint are treated as inseparable from what the pictures mean, rather than as a novelty behind a conventional landscape. Her rapid run of solo shows at Diane Rosenstein, Alexander Berggruen, Perrotin, and Petzel, alongside inclusion in institutional presentations such as ICA Miami's collection exhibition, reflects a fast-building consensus that her work sits at the center of a current generation of landscape painters working at the edge of painting and digital image making.

Webster's auction record is Primavera (2019), which sold for GBP 406,400 (approximately USD 489,000) at Sotheby's London on 1 March 2023, well above its GBP 40,000 to 60,000 estimate, per Artnet's market reporting; MutualArt's aggregate figures for the artist are consistent with that price. Other notable 2023 sales include Untitled (2022) for USD 422,000 at Sotheby's New York and I'm just behind what I am (2020) for HKD 2,032,000 (about USD 259,000) at Sotheby's Hong Kong. HENI's market tracking reports roughly USD 3.16 million in cumulative auction turnover over the trailing four years to 2026, including about USD 438,200 in the two years to May 2026. Artprice records roughly twenty auction appearances for her work, concentrated in the painting category, with her strongest reported 2025 results in Hong Kong.

Webster's market is still early stage, and her limited number of public auction appearances means any single result should be read with caution rather than as a settled benchmark. There is no published catalogue raisonne, so provenance and authenticity checks run primarily through her representing galleries, Petzel and Perrotin. Her deepening museum presence, including acquisitions by the Centre Pompidou and LACMA, and the 2022 Jericho Fellowship are the strongest available signals of institutional durability, while the small and still-forming auction record is the main reason to treat any headline price figure carefully.