Amanda Church “Passengers”

High Noon

[Image: Amanda Church "Swingers" (2021) oil on canvas, 32 x 45 in.]

This event has ended.

I am a passenger
And I ride, and I ride

Iggy Pop, “The Passenger,” from Lust for Life, 1977

High Noon presents Passengers, the gallery’s second exhibition of paintings by Amanda Church. In Church’s newest work, her structural amalgamations become fleshy architectonic compositions evoking a confluence of movement and stasis. Each painting embodies a figure, or at least the sense of one, in various abstracted and indeterminate scenarios that intimate recent dynamics of chaos and confinement.

The hand-rendered edges of Church’s linear topography read as both boundary and restraint; interior and exterior spaces merge and are dispersed among kaleidoscopic bodily fragments. Long, sweeping gestures lead the eye through the composition only to be stopped cold by graphic planes or detoured by intercepting lines. Formally and metaphorically, she conveys the passenger’s experience: immobile observation, the anticipation of the unknown, the romance of surrender.

Church’s linear vocabulary— reminiscent of cloisonnism— incorporates aspects of Henri Matisse’s Blue Nudes which uses negative space as a contour, as well as Valerio Adami’s 1965 Telescoping Rooms, where figures become objects and vice versa. It also gives a nod to the line quality of Roy Lichtenstein’s comic book sensibility, applying varying densities to manipulate the logic of weight, volume, and space.

The cheeky compositional slant of High Beams twists and squirms like backseat lovers. Despite the title, Church’s luminous color palette doesn’t necessarily translate to increased visibility. The dominant flesh tones evoke a panorama of motion, with limbs and lumps butting up against each other at awkward intervals, as if in a rediscovery of intimacy. In Swingers, lines envelop a central focal point, constantly pushing the eye inward through a tangle of connectivity, highlighting Church’s ability to simultaneously force perspective and leave the viewer wondering where they’ve ended up. Positioned “under glass,” the passenger becomes not just an observer looking through a window but also a voyeur privy to an array of secret scenarios.

Amanda Church has been showing throughout the U.S. and Europe for over 20 years, with solo exhibitions in New York, Boston, Los Angeles, Louisville, San Juan, Prague, and Marseilles. Recent exhibitions include Recliners at High Noon, New York; CKR at Steven Harvey Fine Art Projects, New York; Heads and Tales at Espacio 20/20 in Puerto Rico; and Minimal Baroque in Copenhagen, for which she received a grant from the Danish Council on the Arts. She is also a recent recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, as well as grants from the Pollock Krasner Foundation and the New York Foundation for the Arts. Her work is in many private and public collections including Deutsche Bank; The Chambers Hotel, New York; the Progressive Corporation, Cleveland; and the New Jersey State Museum, Trenton. Church lives and works in New York City.