At first sight, Emma Ferrer’s paintings are serene, if slightly melancholic, ones. Her skies are alive with shades of blues, pinks, and grays, her landscapes golden and textured with gestural brushstrokes. Closer inspection, however, reveals a sense of disquiet in these scenes. A dog runs down a village road leaving behind bloody paw prints; a mountain goat on a dirt mound gazes ruefully at a retreating figure; a younger goat lies prone on a red mat, teetering, it seems, between sleep and death.

“I almost feel like some things are too gruesome or shocking to paint,” she told me during a walkthrough of the exhibition. “I don’t want them to have that shock factor, but I want them to have a very subtle eeriness.”

Emma Ferrer, A Humble Return (2024). Courtesy of Sapar Contemporary and the artist.

Ferrer’s paintings are making their debut at New York’s Sapar Contemporary, in “The Scapegoat.” The show brings together works she recently created in her studio in Tuscany, for which she had decamped after a six-year spell in New York. In tone and tenor, the art bears out the solitude and untamed nature of her Italian outpost, woven with nods to the region’s storied art history.

Emma Ferrer, Agnus Dei (2024). Courtesy of Sapar Contemporary and the artist.

While her art is making its first appearance on the scene, the artist herself is no stranger to the spotlight. Ferrer is the granddaughter of Hollywood legend Audrey Hepburn (her father is Hepburn and actor Mel Ferrer’s son, Sean)—a relationship that has kindled breathless press coverage over the years, including her outing at age 20 on the cover of Harper’s Bazaar.

Ferrer never got to meet her celebrated grandmother, who died a year before her birth in 1994, and coming to grips with her legacy, she said, was a process.

“I spent a lot of my life feeling like I didn’t know how to live up to that. But I have reached a place where I’m incredibly proud to be the granddaughter of Audrey Hepburn,” she reflected. “It’s a part of my identity and a lot of my life experiences. There’s no point in trying to hide it. It’s part of my journey.”

Emma Ferrer. Photo: Filbert T. Kung.

Ferrer’s journey so far has taken her from Switzerland, where she was born, though Los Angeles, where she spent some of her childhood, and Italy, where she attended the Florence Academy of Art. Along the way, she earned her BA at SUNY Empire in New York and her MFA at Central Saint Martins in London. In the late 2010s, she was back in New York working as a curator and art liaison (she interned at Sapar Contemporary, too), until the lockdowns hit.

At that time, Ferrer told me, she was likewise hit with a desire to return to nature—to be “in the environment that I realize now feeds my practice.” She departed the city and set up a studio in the Apuan Alps, where she was joined by her two herding dogs, Orso and Lilla.

“I really, really love to be alone,” she said. “I still work remotely, in design PR, but ultimately, having that space, time, and quietness is really what allowed me to just pour myself into my practice.”

Sapar’s co-founder Nina Levent concurs, telling me of Ferrer’s resulting paintings: “There was no prelude. This work could not have happened in New York.”

Emma Ferrer, L’abbandono (Abandonment) (2024). Courtesy of Sapar Contemporary and the artist.

Indeed, “The Scapegoat” is riven throughout with ancient lore and practices in ways that seem of another world. The exhibition’s title—and its centerpiece—takes its cue from the Old Testament ritual of the scapegoat, animals either slaughtered or sent out into the wilderness to expel all of humanity’s sins. But notably, it also harks back to William Holman Hunt’s masterwork, The Scapegoat (1854–55)—which Ferrer said she became “obsessed” with—and Francisco de Zurbarán’s Agnus Dei (c. 1635–40). “This whole concept crystallized around those paintings,” said Ferrer.

At the gallery are Ferrer’s haunting interpretation of these brutal, age-old rituals, some of them created on rustic jute and hand-primed linen canvases.

Emma Ferrer, The Scapegoat (2024). Courtesy of Sapar Contemporary and the artist.

The Scapegoat (2024), a response to Hunt, places the wounded animal on barren ground, its sad fate made plain by roiling brushwork and doleful drops of rain. You Will Return the Evil to its Steppe (Homage to Zurbarán) (2024) references a pre-Assyrian rite of spitting into a frog’s mouth before piercing its feet with rose thorns in order to cure a sickness. Ferrer’s beautifully rendered scene depicts her wistful frog staining an otherwise bucolic field with its bloodied feet, the landscape encircled by a painted wooden frame adorned with dying flowers.

This relationship between humans and animals also surfaces in more everyday tableaux such as A Humble Return (2024) and Lost in the Mountains (2024). They capture the sights of the Tuscan countryside, particularly its hunting culture, Ferrer noted, while hinting at more complex questions.

Emma Ferrer, You Will Return the Evil to its Steppe (Homage to Zurbarán) (2024). Courtesy of Sapar Contemporary and the artist.

“The animal has trusted humans, and there’s this betrayal of trust,” she said of these sacrificial practices. “Why do people do this thing in the name of God? Where is God for that animal? Does the animal perceive God in those final moments? I am trying to give the sense of this higher power. I don’t intend to be persuasive at all with my work. I’m just raising questions that go back basically to the beginning of men.”

Ferrer’s deft hand is also on view here. Her Newborn Scapegoat (2024) offers a disorienting perspective of the Terrazza Mascagni in Livorno, the surreal vista heightened by the presence of the titular newborn. Her rendering of physical and emotional depth, such as the placid body of water in At Sea (2024), is delicately achieved.

“This is an unusual body of work,” said Levent, who commended Ferrer for making such an ancient narrative her own. “I think this is something authentic; an artist finds the theme or the theme finds the artist.”

Emma Ferrer, Newborn Scapegoat (2024). Courtesy of Sapar Contemporary and the artist.

The artist and theme having met, the show is a confident one. Ferrer’s is a keen artistic voice—one she hopes will resonate.

“I don’t want the works to be overly obscure. I don’t want their concepts to be alienating,” she said. “If someone can just access these deeper questions that I’ve asked, if a person can find that personal connection to the work, then it’s done its job.”

Emma Ferrer with At Sea (2024). Photo: Filbert T. Kung.

In other ways, too, she hopes it honors her grandmother’s legacy.

During our conversation, she detailed the research Hepburn embarked on for her roles in such films as The Nun’s Story (1959) and Wait Until Dark (1967): “It’s interesting, from an artistic point of view, to see how she poured herself into roles that aren’t Breakfast at Tiffany’s.” The artist’s own deep dives into ancient history, it appears, have an antecedent. Ferrer is also a national ambassador for the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, a role that sees her continuing Hepburn’s tireless advocacy with UNICEF.

“I would like to get to a place where I can marry those worlds and continue that legacy with my artistic practice,” Ferrer said. “As I’ve gotten older, I understand more what she meant to so many people. It’s a privilege that this has landed on me. I feel the best way to honor her is by continuing to be myself.”

“The Scapegoat” is on view at Sapar Contemporary, 9 North Moore Street, New York, through February 15.