AMIE DICKE

Early Years

Amie Dicke was born in Rotterdam in 1978 into a creative family: her mother was a stylist, her father an interior designer and among her grandparents were a poet and an architect. While studying at the Willem de Kooning Academie, she cast the negative space between her legs using marzipan and icing, demonstrating her lasting interest in absence and presence. After graduating in 2000, Dicke moved to New York City, which she found “overwhelming”. The pace of NYC was a stark contrast from Rotterdam, and Dicke used billboards as a focus point for navigation: in 2001 she started making works based on fashion magazines, considering the concept of the promise of beauty and creating emptiness by cutting away parts of the images. It is often written that Dicke was a model while living in NYC, but in fact she was a teen model in Rotterdam, not in New York. “I was too shy to be a good model,” she said in 2024.

Amie Dicke: Artworks

Amie Dicke’s creative practice centres on creating voids and empty spaces in existing imagery. While well-known for defacing fashion portraiture, she also works with found objects, which could be anything from a Turkish photobook to 40,000 glass slides from a shuttered Amsterdam photographic archive. She sometimes uses scalpels, powder and layering to alter images, at other times blowing up images and reproducing them on archival paper. Disturbing familiar narratives in this way asks viewers to consider what established visual cues mean to us, and Dicke’s images have a dualistic quality that blends absence and presence.

• Political Horizon (2017), from 2017’s The Liver Must Go to the Images exhibition, is a large-scale sandpapered piece featuring a blown-up newspaper clipping of two anonymous besuited politicians embracing, turning a run-of-the-mill greeting into a brief moment of intimacy.
• 2019’s tryptich Smile/Lean In/Elbow are digital prints on archival paper, focusing in on details of bodies in a way that upends established fashion photography. The deep red lips of Smile are kissing the bottom of the frame, while Lean In focuses on a detail of a male shoulder. Elbow zooms in on an arm joint, with a short red sleeve at the top of the image.
• Church (2024) is based on a reproduction of a painting Dicke found in a catalogue, which originally featured two girls wearing pleated garments praying. Erasing the girls (although not their shadows) gives a ghostly aura to the pleats that remain behind.

Amie Dicke: Exhibitions

Select Solo Exhibitions

• Figure Head, Oosterkerk, Amsterdam (2025)
• Open Arms, Anat Ebgi Gallery, New York City (2024)
• Solo, Landhuis Oud Amelisweerd/Centraal Museum, Utrecht (2022)
• Meet Me at the Altar, Felix Meritis, Amsterdam (2021)
• One-Liner, Anat Ebgi, Los Angeles (2020)
• The Liver Must Go to the Images, Stigter Van Doesburg, Amsterdam (2017)
• Sucking Stones, Looiersgracht 60, Amsterdam
• Collecting Alibis, Anat Ebgi, Los Angeles and Stigter Van Doesburg, Amsterdam (2013)
• Connected Isolation, Hiromi Yoshii Gallery, Tokyo (2010)
• Passive Drifter, Peres Projects, Berlin (2008)
• Verwilder, Visionaire Gallery, New York City (2005)
• New Season, New Girls, New Looks, D’Amelio Terras, New York City (2004)

Select Group Exhibitions

• S-curve, The Flag Art Foundation, New York City (2026)
• Scratches on Film, Anat Ebgi, Los Angeles
• The Imaginary Made Real, Berry Campbell Gallery, New York City (2024)
• The Conversation, Anat Ebgi at Minnesota Street Project, San Francisco (2019)
• Bic Collection, Centquartre, Paris (2018)
• Once in a Lifetime, Oude Kerk, Amsterdam (2016)
• How Soon is Now?, organised by Gallery Stigter Van Doesgburg, Manifesta, Amsterdam (2015)
• Blood Sugar Sex Magik, The Company, Los Angeles (2012)
• I Should Have Done That, Nest, Den Haag (2011)
• Get Behind Me Satan and Push, Peres Projects, Berlin (2010)
• Call it What You Like!, Collection Rik Reinking, Art Centre Silkeborg Bag (2008)

Further reading

Amie Dicke’s website Amie Dicke’s Instagram 2024 interview from Office about her Open Arms exhibition Amie Dicke’s artist profile page at Anat Ebgi

Amie Dicke FAQs

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