The history of art was, in these stimulating contexts, an early interest for her. Her first teachings in this area were with teacher Zoila Sterenberg, later complemented with various graduates from the Universidad Iberoamericana and the Instituto de Cultura Superior. However, despite her clear aesthetic interests, due to family reasons she did not have the opportunity to pursue a professional career, but her training was given piecemeal in the various workshops and classrooms where she could satisfy her thirst for her learning.

Architecture and interior design have also been part of his interests thanks to his ability to correct plans and manage the essential abstraction to imagine and organize spaces and projections.

Thirsty to expand her knowledge about the evolution of aesthetics throughout history, she immersed herself in the study of diverse cultures and their ways of understanding and developing their peculiar ways of artistically expressing their respective sensibilities.

In 1987, when her teacher Eduardo Cohen was absent from the country for a while, Emilia was put in charge of directing her workshop. In that space, after having gone through an intense learning of the drawing of the human figure from life, she assumed the role of teacher, which opened new veins in terms of the different edges necessary to approach the improvement of the art of drawing and fostering creativity.

Despite social and family blockages resulting from age-old prejudices that at that time censored a woman approaching the human nude as a basis for aesthetic expression, Emilia overcame obstacles of all kinds to stay active in that area, and thus perfect her technique and becoming in turn a teacher who over time managed to develop a rich program of design, drawing and painting at the Universidad Centro CDMX. To do this, she prepared a six-month program that over three years allowed her to break down the different skills that make up aesthetic creation. The line, the positive-negative space, the volume, the planes, the foreshortening etc., were concepts that she transmitted in detail, so that the students could consciously integrate all these elements when undertaking a pictorial or design work.

Emilia has said that Eduardo Cohen was a teacher who opened the door to diverse knowledge that enriched her human and cultural perspective. Being already very ill and aware of his next goal, Cohen commissioned Emilia to continue with the workshop and continue with the same work. The experience she already had was the fundamental basis for developing as a teacher in the workshop inherited from Cohen and in others: one of them in a private space that lasted nearly 20 years, and another one in the Sala Siqueiros aimed at designers. graphics.

Knowing that each student has their own unique abilities, sensitivities and ways of observing and assimilating reality, her teaching in the various workshops she directed was always personalized, taking into account the subjectivity, levels and specific needs of each one.

She ventured into the work of monumental format, thanks to her collaboration with the teacher Eduardo Cohen in works for religious and educational institutions of the Jewish community of Mexico. She was in charge of organizing the plans and moving the large-scale work. Thanks to those experiences that enriched her knowledge about the technique and the process for this type of work, she was later commissioned to make a mural for a Recreation Center for the Elderly, a monumental painting in which she managed to refine her style. to acquire more and more the own seal that from then on would characterize her work.

On a trip to Europe in the 1990s, she met and became friends with a Lithuanian-born musician who was a member of the Fine Art Quartet Wolfgang Laufer,  who inspired her to pictorially approach figures of stringed instruments, and based on that iconography she worked for a long time. It was a series developed with different techniques, which had a great acceptance in Mexico and abroad.

A final step in her pictorial development has consisted of the progressive dilution of the figure until reaching abstractionism. Hence, she has undertaken large-format works in which the line, the geometric traces, the color, became the relevant elements. As if such a complete mastery of the figure had given way to a qualitative leap tending to its destruction, passing through its fragmentation and a departure from black and white that were characteristic of her early works. She appeared the color in all her ranges, as well as the search for solutions in terms of composition, textures, planes, expressive force and visual impact. Her evolution shows a peculiar rational exercise as a starting point, mixed with a spontaneous intuition that directs the creative process towards a reborn vitality.

In her most recent works, she has used acrylics combined with oil, while inks and crayons are used as suitable complements for retouching certain final details. Difficult stages in his personal life have been reflected in pieces produced spontaneously, without deliberate intention, but undoubtedly expressive of the impacts of those painful experiences that have been read by some astute observers as vehicles for catharsis or the revelation of a premonition or a message.

Throughout her career of more than four decades, she has accumulated dozens of individual and collective exhibitions. Among the first, some of the most important were the MUCA at UNAM CDMX, where her work was cataloged and sent to Spain. She also exhibited in 1991 during the inauguration of the theaters of the Broward Center for the Performing Arts in Miami USA, while at the Misrachi gallery under the direction of Enrique and Carlos Beraha, she had one of the most important supports for the dissemination of her work in Mexico and for admission to certain international collections.

Cinema, literature and especially visits to museums have been very important stimuli to feed her creativity. The meticulous observation of the aesthetic explorations and the solutions that the artistic geniuses of the past and the present have contributed to our collective background, has been for Emilia a tool that she has been able to incorporate into her work with sensitivity and acuity. She has thus been able, through a fruitful assimilation of the mastery and talent of those who preceded us, to discover her own aesthetic language in which the singularity of her style is undoubtedly appreciated. Among her favorite artists are Picasso and Egon Schiele, while in accordance with her most recent creative stage, already fully abstract, she acknowledges her admiration for Rufino Tamayo, Gunther Gerzso, Fernando de Szyszlo and many others.

– ESTHER SHABOT