Biography
Amy Green received her BFA in painting at the University of Tennessee in 1995 and her MFA from the California Institute of the Arts (CalArts) in 1997.
Her paintings and installations have been shown nationally and internationally. Exhibitions include Rolf Ricke Galerie in Cologne and the Neues Museum in Nurnberg, Galerie Karin Friebe, Mannheim, Germany, Galerie Monika Reitz, Frankfurt and Kunstverein St. Gallen Art Museum in Switzerland, Evelyne Canus Gallery, Paris, Cirrus and Susanne Vielmetter in Los Angeles and Cohan Leslie and Browne in New York, among other venues. Reviews include New York Arts Magazine, Art Issues, the Basel Art Fair Catalogue and artnet.
Amy Green is represented by Galerie Schmidt Maczollek in Germany.
Additional information:
www.schmidtmaczollek.com | www.artslant.com | www.amygreen-art.com
Statement
I am an abstract painter interested in materials like urethane rubber, plastics and felt. I’m interested in stains and accidents, the way the paint sits on the surface of the materials I use—plastic, felt, canvas—and also how the paint soaks into it and how the materials then rise off the surface.
The surfaces recall landforms, leftovers, or residue. Their forms are frozen on the canvas. They stand and vaporize, move and stop with and through each other on the gallery walls, like clouds passing through ghost light. Their stripes and pours stop and start the flow in the room. Their reflective surfaces adapt to the space, returning the light from outside the gallery back to them. Sometimes it seems as if they have a connection to the earth, to what nature does—flow, drip, erode—or a connection to giant reflective surfaces like Mars or the moon.
There is also a connection to the paintings and architecture and then domestic space. I want to free up the history of feminist art and craft a little bit in a kind careless or disinterested aesthetic, which I think is also attached to industry, like the housing industry, its failure, in the subtle beauty of objects left over, like thin floor boards or sound panels from a worksite.
Thinking about industry and using industrial materials makes me think about post minimalism, and looking at the way the forms push each other or are restless, and color field painting in which the physicality of the materials and the simple mass of color push painting out on the walls. In installing my paintings, I often play with their relationship to space; toying with the idea that paintings are not static, but instead are active and that they can push the air and space between them, round up the room, as if they could actually move the four walls.
In my last exhibition at Galerie Schmidt Maczollek in Cologne, I installed the paintings as if they were part of a weathervane, or even better as if they could activate the weather or were atmosphere, and a part of it. The space and the works found equal footing.