AMANDA WALL

Amanda Wall’s sensuous paintings evoke the physicality and gestural spontaneity of Abstract Expressionism, while capturing colour and light that feels distinct to Southern California. The self-taught artist frequently depicts exposed or prone subjects giving an air of intimacy and fetishistic quality to her paintings. Using a palette ranging from bright blues and pulsing pinks to deep blacks her paintings have an intuitive intensity that defies singular readings.

In Wall’s recent works, figuration and abstraction are not opposite parts, rather they are complementary elements, which produce a delicate uncertainty; forms, moods, and attitudes becoming something else—pointing to phenomena real or emotional. Energized through mystery and withholding, her repetitive themes and subjects include: cigarettes, glasses of water, cherries, and portraiture. The artist’s use of containment, distorted perspective, and concealment introduces a freshness which heightens the eroticism and psychological spaces she explores.

Wall’s paintings feel instantaneous, like polaroids or snapshots. In this way her works seem to comment on contemporary portraiture, image-making, and our ever-expanding digital repository. As viewers, we are made to feel like voyeurs, observing isolated characters, without companions, for our own pleasure or gratification. Her portraits and still lifes are composed of conflicting layers and erected boundaries, subjects revealed through cups or bouquets of flowers, eyes and faces are obscured. These fragments coalesce into a unified whole, addressing sexuality, the body, image making, vision, and a kaleidoscopic range of human emotion.

Amanda Wall (b.1985, Hood River, OR) has shown her work in group and solo exhibitions internationally at galleries including, Anat Ebgi, Los Angeles; The Cabin, Los Angeles; Köning Galerie, Berlin; Almine Rech, New York and Brussels; Nino Mier, Los Angeles; and Gana Art, Seoul. Her work is in the public collection of the X Museum, Beijing. Wall lives and works in Los Angeles, CA.