LORENZO AMOS

Early Life and Background

Lorenzo Amos was born in New York in 2002 and grew up between the city and nearby suburbs, raised in a close-knit Catholic family that underpins the spiritual and ethical dimensions of his work. He began painting seriously in his teens without formal art school training, instead learning through obsessive looking at Old Master painting, online image circulation, and time spent in New York museums. Amos continues to live and work in New York, drawing on the textures of his immediate environment and relationships as primary material.

Lorenzo Amos Artworks

Lorenzo Amos creates figurative paintings, often in oil on linen or canvas, that depict friends and loved ones in kitchens, living rooms, bedrooms, and backyards, folding these scenes into compressed, sometimes vertiginous spaces where bodies, furniture, and architecture seem to share the same emotional charge. His work blends devotional intensity with everyday observation, channeling influences from Titian, Caravaggio, Alice Neel, Henry Taylor, Noah Davis, and religious painting into an intimate, contemporary language of colour, touch, and gesture.

Domestic Space and Togetherness

A defining feature of Amos’s practice is the way domestic space becomes a stage for collective life, grief, celebration, and private ritual. Paintings frequently show groups gathered around tables, clustered on sofas, or resting in bed, their faces shifting between specificity and near-abstraction as Amos layers and scrapes paint to register time, memory, and emotional afterglow. Works from his exhibition No Regrets Because You’re My Sunshine at Gratin in London, for instance, tie scenes of shared meals and late-night conversations to the artist’s experience of loss and resilience in his community.

Materiality, Colour, and Process

Amos often works at an intimate to mid-scale, using oil paint in thin veils and dense passages that alternately reveal the weave of the ground and build up sculptural, almost fresco-like surfaces. His palette moves between warm, sunlit ochres and saturated blues, pinks, and greens, with abrupt tonal shifts that echo the emotional modulation of his scenes—from rest and tenderness to tension and uncertainty. Many works are reworked over long periods, leaving ghosts of earlier figures or objects visible beneath the final image, so that each painting feels like a palimpsest of overlapping moments rather than a single snapshot.

Faith, Narrative, and Art History

Catholic imagery and ritual subtly shape Amos’s compositions, which sometimes recall altarpieces or devotional pictures translated into contemporary apartments and backyards. Figures gather in poses reminiscent of Last Suppers or lamentations, while objects such as candles, tablecloths, or windows take on symbolic weight without breaking the paintings’ grounded, observational quality. Amos’s work is often read as a bridge between religious painting, social realism, and contemporary portraiture, situating his everyday sitters within a continuum of art-historical representation and care.

Lorenzo Amos Exhibitions

Lorenzo Amos has been the subject of solo and group exhibitions with respected galleries and institutions recognised for championing emerging contemporary art. In 2024, his work was shown in No Regrets Because You’re My Sunshine, at Gratin, London (2024).

In 2025, the Rubell Museum in Miami announced a solo presentation of paintings by Amos from 1 December 2025 through fall 2026, opening during Miami Art Week and positioning the young New York–based artist within one of the most visible contemporary art platforms in the United States. The show was announced to focus on a suite of large-scale oil-on-linen works acquired by the Rubell family, including compositions such as Dog (2025), Lily by the Wall (2025), Self-Portrait in a Red Jacket (2025), and Wall with Knight (2025), which extend Amos’s interest in domestic interiors, portraiture, and spiritualised everyday scenes into ambitious museum-scale formats.

Lorenzo Amos FAQs

Ocula | 2025