La Pittura: A Painted World by Emma Kohlmann for HAY

Some objects aren’t just made, they emerge. They carry with them a residue of thought, emotion, resistance. La Pittura, the new ceramic collection from HAY in collaboration with American artist Emma Kohlmann, is exactly that kind of work.

Emma Kohlmann, who first gained a following through zines, small-run books, and Tumblr-era intimacy, is now represented in international collections, with original paintings reaching five-figure prices. But her practice has never lost its immediacy. Her figures feel dreamt more than drawn – delicate, fluid, often androgynous – navigating the space between form and feeling, gender and gesture.

For La Pittura, Emma Kohlmann translates her visual language onto a set of hand-painted stoneware objects: plates, bowls, cups, trivets, a jug, a vase. The name means “the painting”, and that’s what these pieces are – not artworks reproduced onto tableware, but paintings in their own right.

Each motif has the looseness of watercolour, yet the tactility of clay: a blue flower drifting into abstraction, a face that feels halfway between sculpture and scribble. They’re meant to be used. Touched. Washed. Lived with. And yet they wouldn’t look out of place in a frame or on a plinth.

Emma Kohlmann's background in political philosophy filters into her work not as a message, but as a framework. One that understands the body as political, the domestic as public, the emotional as structural. Her images aren’t didactic, but they ask questions. She has said she often feels like “just the messenger”, as if her paintings arrive from somewhere else entirely.

And maybe that’s the quiet power of La Pittura: these are not loud design statements, but fragments of something larger. They don’t demand attention. They invite presence.

This exclusive collection launches in August 2025 and is available only through a small number of carefully selected retailers, including us.