Amy Feldman – Nerve Reserve

James Cohan is pleased to present the gallery’s first solo exhibition of new paintings by Brooklyn-based artist Amy Feldman.

Amy Feldman generates her grey-on-grey paintings at the electrifying junction of the gesturally performative and the humorous. These works are often massive in scale and embrace the strange, pulsing forms that captivate Feldman. As Feldman freely – even eagerly – admits, these paintings and her practice as a whole are intentionally risky.

Feldman’s paintings are the product of a fundamental duality between preparation and execution as she translates her initial drawings into exuberant forms. What appears as casual is carefully intentioned, yet the application of the paint itself is the work of an instant, creating paintings that are tenaciously rooted in the present moment. Each canvas is like a live performance, presenting a lasting index of Feldman’s movements and looping in perpetuity wherever the work is on view. For Feldman, the strength of her work lies in its immediacy and the vitality of her forms. The contemporary world foists an endless saturation of images and information upon us but Feldman’s works force the viewer to grapple in real-time with the image she presents.

The seductive forms that inhabit her paintings are consciously anthropomorphic and deadpan. Referencing the artist’s personal history and corporeality, these shapes become signifiers of widespread anxiety. This is exemplified in the charged tensions between figure and ground, image and edge. Feldman’s titles solidify the paradoxes that are inherent to the work. They are loaded with rhyme, word play, and puns that purposefully undercut the gravity of the canvases and act as a reproach to the masculine heroism of midcentury abstraction.

These canvases envelop the viewer in the fantastic schematics of Feldman’s imagination, commanding introspection and meditating on paintings’ potential to distill human experience.

Amy Feldman (b. 1981) received her BFA from the Rhode Island School of Design and her MFA from Rutgers University. She has been the subject of solo exhibitions in Berlin, Brussels, Chicago, Milan, New York, San Francisco and Stockholm. Select group exhibitions include “Riot Grrrls”, Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago (2016-2017); “New York Painting”, curated by Christoph Schreier, Kunstmuseum, Bonn, Germany (2015); “The New York Moment”, curated by Lorand Hegyi, Musée d’art Moderne, St. Etienne, France (2014); The Academy of Arts and Letters, New York, NY (2013); and “Decenter”, curated by Daniel S. Palmer and Andrianna Campbell, Abrons Art Center, New York, NY (2013).

Feldman received a Joan Mitchell Foundation Grant in 2013. Her work is in the permanent collection of the Museum of Contemporary Art (MCA) in Chicago, IL.

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Location:
James Cohan Gallery
291 Grand Street
10002 New York NY
United States