Emma Beatrez knows what you did last summer… and she painted it too

By MARGARET HONOR RAND September 17th 2026

As the art world reawakens with openings across the city, Emma Beatrez’s third solo show Candy Apple at HAIR+NAILS New York is a seasonal treat to kick off the fall season.

The hazy, spinning carousels and cheerleaders enveloped in flames that have become familiar subjects in Beatrez’s work return, now alongside nocturnal domestic interiors and weeping women. Drawn to images that feel candid and unguarded, she pulls from personal archives, and snapshots taken with her own point-and-shoot camera, before cropping, collaging, and recomposing them into new scenes. The paintings retain the familiarity and immediacy of a photograph with just enough context removed to leave the viewer wondering what decade, or even what location, they are looking at.

Installation view of Candy Apple © Emma Beatrez, Courtesy the artist and HAIR+NAILS

Raised in the rural town of New Prague, Minnesota, Beatrez grew up in a community where cheerleading, church and county fairs dominated the social calendar. These familiar fixtures of small-town American life have long been a source of fascination, from coming-of-age films to television series like Friday Night Lights, where camaraderie, competition, and local politics become entangled. Beatrez is similarly interested in the underbelly of these seemingly ordinary rituals. As she explained to me over the phone in the days leading up to her opening, “In these rural, flyover parts of America, there is a lot that happens that goes unnoticed.”

Emma Beatrez, Chariot, 2026 © Emma Beatrez, Courtesy the artist and HAIR+NAILS

In Chariot (2026), a grainy amber glow obscures a cinematic image of a young girl on a merry-go-round. The flash-like glare overexposes the white horse and the girl’s body, while her face disappears entirely into shadow. Her tilted head and slightly arched back recall the pose of a child responding to a parent’s command to “Smile!” The recognizable pose recalls a childhood memory or a scene from a film, yet the blurred background and ambiguous subject obscures any distinct time or place. This distance, combined with the voyeuristic quality of an image being taken, creates the feeling of unease and time unfolding beyond the frame.

A similar tension unwinds in a different image in the exhibition. A trio of paintings, Hex I - III (2026), each depict a nearly identical young woman shielding her face in a moment of emotion. Cropped tightly and rendered with the same hazy overexposure as Chariot, each portrait is further destabilized by the playful addition of green plastic witch fingers. The original source image for the composition was taken by Beatrez herself. The sitter, a friend of the artist, followed directives recalling the forms of a weeping Madonna or the theatrical gesture of a scorned woman awaiting judgment. While discussing this work, Beatrez explained there was no particular court case or political event in mind, but rather, like her larger body of work, she sought to depict a semi-ambiguous scene to reference a larger feeling of unease--one that most certainly has been felt across the nation over the past few years.

Installation view of Hex I - III, 2026 © Emma Beatrez, Courtesy the artist and HAIR+NAILS  

There is a distinct feeling of something foreboding across her body of work. This was more explicit in her last solo show at HAIR+NAILS, Polyester, Beatrez’s first exhibition in the gallery’s New York space in May 2025. Titled after the flammable material of cheerleaders’ uniforms, the exhibition brought together militant human pyramids, pep-rally bonfires, and cheerleaders with eerie, exaggerated smiles, their eyes catching the glare of the camera flash or fire. The clever title combined with Beatrez’s cult-like scenes conjured a sense of a looming threat or general instability, themes that continue to resonate in Candy Apple and its own metaphorical “sickly sweet” images.

One work from Polyester that has stayed with me was a painting of a stone archway engraved with the word “Girls.” It contrived a number of things to me: the entrance to some kind of cult or the remnants of an old all-girls school. Curious about its source imagery, I asked Beatrez about the painting and discovered it came from a photograph she had taken of a bathroom sign in a park in Chinatown.

Emma Beatrez, Portal, 2024 © Emma Beatrez

This is what I love most about Beatrez’s work: she creates compositions specific enough to stir recognition and imagination in her viewers, without imposing an exact narrative. Her paintings feel like time capsules capturing the way the artist processes and absorbs imagery, preserving some details and leaving others out. This push and pull in the construction of each composition creates uncertainty, confusion, and nostalgia. Candy Apple feels distinctly American yet eerie, a subtle, clever nod to the times we find ourselves in and a reminder of all the things going on below the surface.

Candy Apple runs from September 9 — October 25 at HAIR+NAILS on 39 Henry Street