AMANDA WALL: SKY GOT DARK
Almine Rech New York, Upper East Side is pleased to present Sky got dark, Amanda Wall's fourth solo exhibition with the gallery. Time collapses in a gloomy penumbra.
June 26 - August 2, 2024
Transcending the visual, the work of Amanda Wall comes with an inebriating sensorial quality. As she swallows us in her surreal soulscapes imbued with voluptuous yet muted glossy tones, a creamy and tangy smell almost seems to impregnate our nostrils.
Sky Got Dark sees the recurring motifs of Wall’s visual vocabulary constitute new emotional scenarios. Plump blue cherries, distorted objects, tender lips, long-legged figures and grasping hands vacillates between reality and psychological absurdity. Their confines lead the gaze towards fleeting and enigmatic cityscape horizons where, ominous of a catastrophe, the troubled sky seems like the smooth stretched skin of a fruit.
An evolution of the shadowy, saturated color fields that define the artist's production, these dawning urban panoramas emerging far away behind the subjects, seem to further enhance their isolated state.
Bodies wrestling with their own borders, mirror the intimate and fragmented experience of being alive. The existential plurality of the self is confronted with the stillness of bodily matter. It’s their inherent porosity that Wall’s convulsive figures try to grapple with.
The series is diluted in various scales that encompass the artist's traditional large canvases, while also engaging with smaller, more intimate formats that still encapsulate the seductive compulsion of Amanda Wall’s visual language. Exploring the boundaries of classical portraiture and experimenting with the parameters of technique, Wall’s vibrant gestural confidence preserves the instinctiveness for which her work is known, blurring the boundaries of intimacy between voyeur and subject.
Amanda Wall’s uncanny and contorted perspective implicates us, the viewers, to the extent that we're not merely observers lying on the floor beside that body twisting before us; rather, we become that very body. Legs apart, hips bending toward the right, fingers grasping the ground, it is our body crawling, twisting, stretching.