Emily Gillbanks (b. 1999) is a British painter and researcher based in East Anglia, whose practice explores what it means to paint from life in a digitally saturated world. Deeply engaged with the legacies of social realism and the evolving genre of New Figurative painting, her work blends traditional painterly techniques with the visual languages of spatial computing and screen-based culture. By treating her subjects—often family members, friends, and everyday strangers—as both deeply personal and abstracted figures, she repositions portraiture as a means of inquiry into the nature of contemporary presence and perception.
Gillbanks holds an MA in Painting from the Royal College of Art, where she was the youngest person ever to receive the degree. During her time there, she was awarded the Elizabeth Greenshields Foundation Grant twice and won The Fribourg Philanthropies Painting Prize upon graduating in 2022. Her early promise was also recognized by The de László Foundation, who awarded her the Medal for Excellence in Painting in 2021 for her work Three Things, exhibited at Mall Galleries. She was also shortlisted for both the BP Portrait Award and The Freelands Painting Prize in 2020.
Her paintings draw from historical compositions, theatre, and canonical portraiture while engaging critically with contemporary questions of technology, identity, and observation. Gillbanks describes her process as a form of data attainment—treating her subjects like notations, rich with coded emotional and visual information to be extracted and interpreted. Through this, she investigates the dissonance between physical and digital presence, coining the term quasi-Dasein to describe a form of “seeming” presence that emerges through digital mediation.
In her conceptually driven and visually rich paintings, faces and bodies become sites of philosophical questioning: how do we encounter one another when filtered through layers of surveillance, social media, and the vernacular of screens? She draws on the writings of Heidegger and Rilke to inform her phenomenological and ontological approach, arguing that the so-called “lies” within her paintings are often more truthful than appearances—because they are illusions she chooses and constructs deliberately.
In 2023, Gillbanks held her debut solo exhibition, Temporary Sitters, at JD Malat Gallery in London. The show examined alienation, anonymity, and the quiet intimacy of shared public spaces. In 2025 Emily showcased Haus: Everything is a Short-Lived Expereince, a reflection of the home, space and intimacy in an age of digital mediation at Hope93 Gallery.