Notti Rosa

Artists

Emily Sundblad

Press release

Emanuela Campoli is pleased to present Notti Rosa, a new exhibition by Emily Sundblad conceived specifically for the gallery’s apartment setting across from the Piccolo Teatro Strehler in the heart of Milan. The proximity to Strehler’s stage—long associated with a finely tuned sense of theatricality and the expressive absurd—casts a subtle glow over the exhibition, heightening Sundblad’s attention to gesture, mood, and the porous line between performance and stillness. In these rooms, the domestic scale slows the viewer down; each space holds its own emotional weather.

The title Notti Rosa evokes the atmosphere of nights that seem to belong to the interior life of a home—those attentive, unhurried hours when shadows, colors, and small gestures acquire a heightened clarity in a city that has begun to dim for the night. It recalls the tonal worlds of Italian writers Cesare Pavese (1908–1950), Elsa Morante (1912–1985), and Natalia Ginzburg (1916–1991), for whom night was never an emptiness but a field of quiet intensities. Here, “pink nights” suggest not spectacle but a threshold: the soft afterlight between day and dark, where emotions gather, and perception sharpens.

Throughout the apartment’s three rooms and bathroom, Sundblad stages a sequence of works that suggest the lingering presence of a woman who may have once lived here—or may still be inhabiting the space in a suspended, half-imagined form. A nightgown from circa 1975, made by the iconic Swedish fabric company Almedahls (once owned by Sundblad’s family) and reworked by designer Rafaella in 2025, appears almost to occupy the room, placed on a life-size mannequin; together with additional garments, it establishes the exhibition’s quietly inhabited atmosphere. Their terry-cloth textures, combined with the grey-green carpet underfoot, conjure a 1970s vocabulary of house-wear: garments that sit somewhere between bathrobes and dresses, blending comfort with a latent performativity. A single flower painting (Untitled, 41 x 33 cm) from 2020 introduces a note of melancholy, an anchor to the emotional register that runs through the exhibition.

In the adjoining room, a large-scale tapestry made by the renowned textile workshop Handarbetets Vänner and woven specifically by Hanna Sköld, based on Sundblad’s 2025 painting The Adolescent Oceans—itself drawing on Édouard Manet’s Olympia (1863)—extends this interior fantasy. Its fringes spill across sheets like hair falling over a pillow. On the bed lies another robe, carefully placed, also produced by Almedahls for the Swedish Olympic team at the Seoul Olympics in 1988. 

Nearby hangs the exhibition’s largest work (200 x 180 cm), a canvas set against a metallic background whose reflective gravity lends the room a gently surreal temporality. The painting—Balthazar’s Dream—depicts a donkey and, nearby, a girl behind trees, surrounded by bright flowers, blossoms, and butterflies. Its atmosphere carries a distant echo of Robert Bresson’s Au hasard Balthazar (1966).

The bathroom becomes a stage of its own, animated by a pink robe dating from approximately 1959 and reworked by Rafaella in 2025. It hangs close by—almost a bathrobe, almost an outdoor coat—its surface marked with glitter, rhinestones, and flashes of gold and silver that appear throughout the exhibition. A small oval painting of two red lips (35 x 28 cm), functioning as a mirror without a face, seems to reflect the apartment more than the viewer, as though the space itself were speaking to the absent inhabitant whose traces animate these rooms.

A singer as much as a painter, Sundblad will give a concert on 10 December at 7 PM to mark the opening of the exhibition. Her performance history includes appearances at The Kitchen in New York (2015), the Palazzo Grassi, Venice (2015), and performances at The Museum of Modern Art, New York (2011). She also performed outside the art context at the Lenox Lounge in Harlem (2012) and The Station Inn in Nashville (2016). In Milan, Sundblad will be accompanied by celebrated Los Angeles–based musician Emmett Kelly. These crossings between visual art and performance infuse Notti Rosa with the sense that each room might hold the residue of a song, a gesture, or a scene just rehearsed.

Notti Rosa presents an artist refining a language of interiority and atmosphere, allowing Milan’s winter nights—and the quiet theatrical shadows of Foro Buonaparte—to inflect the emotional logic of the work.

Emily Sundblad was born in Sweden in 1977 and moved to New York in 1998 to study at Parsons School of Design. She later completed the highly regarded Whitney Independent Study Program. She founded the gallery Reena Spaulings Fine Art with John Kelsey in 2004. Her recent exhibitions include Bortolami, New York (2025 and 2022); Weiss Falk, Zürich (2024); Galerie Hussenot, Paris (2024); House of Gaga, Los Angeles (2024); Weiss Falk, Basel (2021); Campoli Presti, Paris (2020); Galerie Neu, Berlin (2020); and Xavier Hufkens, Brussels (2017), among others.