AMIE DICKE

An artist talk with Barry Schwabsky will be held at the gallery Saturday, September 7th at 5 pm.

Amie Dicke is an image defacer. Her interventions dissolve, blot, and distort the appearance and surface of her source material. Her intuitive and judicious destruction directs our focus to specific off-beat details, such as a gap between the legs, or a lumpy bedspread. An acute observer, she hunts, seeking a surprising, around-the-back approach. Relying on guts and intuition, she detects some underlying possibility in an image that she can alter, erase, subdue or enhance resulting in a new picture, with new stability achieved through the conflict and balance of slippery forces.

Whether caked with lipstick or liquid foundation, or brutally buffed away with sandpaper, Dicke’s process is located in responding to something emotional and raw she finds in her imagery sourced across different genres, from fashion magazines to Bauhaus catalogues to art historical painting. Muse and victim, Manet’s Olympia acts as the substrate for Dicke’s Nude (2024). The icons are inflicted with traces of Dicke’s bodily action, her sandpaper abrasions scar the surface-image—removing the famous reclining nude and servant figures. A chorus of rubbed marks echo the animated flicker of Jasper John’s cross-hatching or the sense of violation evoked by Lucio Fontana’s slashed monochromes.

The installation of ‘sugar books’ strips the objects of their legibility, covering each in sugar granules to conceal their contents. Now blank, blanketed, the pages are nullified spreads: glistening, immaculate, white, tactile, functionless. Dicke has explored sugar as a material throughout her career, beginning with How sweet is the space between my legs? (2000), where she cast the negative space between her legs in marzipan and sugar. Drawn to its transitory qualities, that it can dissolve, melt, or harden, it is also consumable and digestible. Once ingested, sugar assimilates itself into the body, entering the bloodstream; eat too much of it and you will bear the consequences. In the gallery, the splayed pages appear raw, almost excavated, elemental, reduced to an essential nature; they await transformation.

Dicke’s work is characterised by a desire to crystalise an intimacy through close looking, to break free of preconceptions. Through small repeated gestures of deconstruction, she believes something emerges, sometimes softer, sometimes sharper. Her deletions create space and distance, to observe with newfound physicality and presence.

Amie Dicke (b. 1978, Rotterdam, Netherlands) rose to prominence in the early 2000s after a period of living and working in New York City, where she literally defaced the advertising imagery of Madison Avenue, obscuring the features of famous models and driving nails through glossy publications. Some of these publications subsequently commissioned Dicke to contribute to their pages including Vogue, Numero, V Magazine, and Visionaire.

Since then, Dicke has exhibited her work internationally in venues such as Schirn Kunsthalle, Frankfurt, Germany; Tate Modern and Project Space 176 in London; FLAG Art Foundation, New York; Art Centre Silkeborg Bad in Denmark; and Anat Ebgi, Los Angeles, CA. Recent solo exhibition history includes: Centraal Museum at Landhuis Oud Amelisweerd, Utrecht, Netherlands; EENWERK, Amsterdam, Netherlands; ONE-LINER, Anat Ebgi, Los Angeles, CA; GEM Museum of Contemporary Art, The Hague, Netherlands; and Hiromi Yoshii Gallery, Tokyo, Japan. Her work is included in several major collections including Gemeentemuseum The Hague, Collection Rob Defares, Direct Art Collection, the Zabludowicz Collection, Collection Rik Reinking, Takashi Murakami and the City Collection of Rotterdam through the Museum Boijmans van Beuningen. Dicke lives and works in Amsterdam, Netherlands.