Amanda Church

Amanda Church is an artist living and working in New York City. Her paintings’ overarching Pop ethos has consistently referenced the body in landscape, and of late has veered toward figuration, with recognizable body parts populating what remains an essentially abstract arena.
Following on the heels of her Heads and Tales show of reductive portraiture in 2015 at Espacio 20/20 in San Juan, Puerto Rico, Church’s latest work leaves the head behind to focus instead on other parts of the body, specifically arms, legs, and hands. Some of these paintings evince the feel of the seashore and were in fact drawn from photos of friends sitting by the ocean. An intimation of the horizon line is often present, as is an intangible eroticism. The tube paintings – hands holding paint tubes aloft – are more self-referential, purveying a totemic artist-in-the-studio sensation of simultaneous isolation and excitement. The distortion of the figure in all the works is mitigated by their sunny Pop sensibility.

Church has been showing consistently throughout the United States and Europe for the past 20 years, with solo exhibitions in New York, Boston, Los Angeles, Louisville, San Juan, Prague, and Marseille. Recent group exhibitions include HeadSpace at Morris-Warren Gallery in New York, New New York: Abstract Painting in the 21st Century at the University of Hawaii in Honolulu, and Minimal Baroque in Copenhagen, Denmark, for which Church received a grant from the Danish Council on the Arts. Her work is in public collections such as the Deutsche Bank and the Chambers Hotel in New York, the Progressive Corporation in Cleveland, and the New Jersey State Museum in Trenton.