Amy Feldman: Good Fortune
Opening on Wednesday, January 15, 6 – 8 pm
Galerie Eva Presenhuber is pleased to present Good Fortune, the gallery’s third exhibition with the New York-based artist Amy Feldman. It is her first solo exhibition in Austria.
The Heart of the Matter
Amy Feldman is in her blue period. After 15 years mining shades of grey, elucidating the endless variation that exists between the poles of light and darkness, she has turned to ceruleans and prussians, shades of azure and cobalt. The paintings in Good Fortune are the manifestation of this call to blue—to the divinity of the color itself and the sublimity of its presence in the sea and sky, which meet just outside the windows of Feldman’s Brooklyn studio. Feldman falls in good company, following the likes of everyone from Picasso and Yves Klein to Derek Jarman and Maggie Nelson in her yielding to this siren.
Feldman often works in series, using repetition within and beyond each canvas to understand where form and color move from similar to different and what exactly it is that makes them similar or different. Inspired here by the block print textiles found on the women of Gustav Klimt’s portraits, Feldman employs a technique similar to that of textile design. Using screen-printed images of canvas as her support, Feldman’s marks are digitally manipulated photo impressions made using hand-carved potato stamps, which begin the process of shriveling and rotting the moment they are cut open. For as long as she has been painting, Feldman has been doing a kind of dance with Father Time, allowing his parameters to dictate aspects of her making. Here, via the use of a potato to apply ink and paint, Feldman is tracking time through form. As the potatoes shrivel, the traces they leave grow further and further from their original form, eventually becoming something else entirely.
The transmogrification of Feldman’s potato forms is real, but the moment of transmogrification itself is murky. Like a body moving through time, the changes are both subtle and disorienting in their magnitude. To view evidence, or traces, of a body moving through time challenges the supremacy of truth. Like in Feldman’s paintings, what one knows as truth in any particular moment requires a suspension of all the truths we previously knew and that are yet to come. The surface looks like raw canvas and appears to have texture, but doesn’t actually, and forms that appear to have dimension are in fact flat.
Feldman’s transmogrification here is also partly inspired by Bleigiessen, a New Year’s tradition in German-speaking countries in which molten lead is poured into water and the solid abstractions that form when the lead is cooled become predictions for the new year. “The tradition is also a metaphor for what happens when I execute a form,” Feldman shares. “If I draw something a hundred times, the final variation holds a truth. It is permanent and must be interpreted.” Bleigiessen too taps into Feldman’s interest in constraint and control: over what aspects of our lives and bodies do we have autonomy and how do our attempts at control either lead us astray or reveal themselves as a certain attempt at truth?
Conceived and produced specifically for exhibition in wintertime Vienna, one can easily see snow falling—randomly, in shapes that move in and out of recognizability—in works such as Celestial Screen, Wonder Margin, and Magic Matter. These same forms become enlarged in Good Fortune and Sky Secret: their impermanence as snow quite literally dissolving as they are made bold and dominant. Flip flops like this occur throughout the show—background and foreground working together to subvert a static reading.
Bodies that have previously been implied or covertly coded within Feldman’s paintings begin to emerge here in rudimentary faces. The appearance of even a hint of representation is a shift for Feldman. However, she does not step beyond the bounds of abstraction. In edging around such obvious polarities, she again forces her viewers to reconsider what they know and what they think they know—and where the difference between the two may lie.
Sara Roffino
Amy Feldman was born in 1981 in New Windsor, NY, US, and lives and works in New York, NY, US. Feldman received her Bachelor of Fine Arts from the Rhode Island School of Design, Providence, RI, US (2003); and her Master of Fine Arts from Rutgers University, New Brunswick, NJ, US (2008). She is the recipient of The Joan Mitchell Foundation Grant (2013); The John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship (2018); The Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant (2021). Recent solo exhibitions were presented at Galerie Eva Presenhuber, Zurich, CH (2022); Eva Presenhuber, New York, NY, US (2021); The Journal, New York, NY, US (2019); Ratio 3, San Francisco, CA, US (2016); and Corbett vs Dempsey, Chicago, IL, US (2016). Feldman participated at group exhibitions at Galerie Eva Presenhuber x TAXA, Seoul, KR (2023); Galerie Eva Presenhuber, Zurich, CH (2022); The Hall Art Foundation, Schloss Derneburg Museum, Derneburg, DE (2018); Sheldon Museum of Art, Lincoln, NE, US (2017); Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, IL, US (2017); Rosenwald-Wolf Gallery at The University of the Arts, Philadelphia, PA, US (2017); Kunstmuseum, Bonn, DE (2015); The New York Moment, Musée d’art Moderne, St. Etienne, FR (2014).