Amy Cutler | Brood
Galleri Magnus Karlsson is pleased to present the first solo exhibition by Amy Cutler in the gallery. Brood is also the first gallery exhibition by American artist Amy Cutler in Europe.
Amy Cutler intertwines unique allegories with threads of actualities, art history, folk tales and personal experiences. The paintings, drawings and prints are meticulously detailed, mysterious and surrealistic depictions of people, animals and hybrids in dream-like activities. They have a perplexing quality that encourages the viewer to enter the work in order to find the keys. For the exhibition Brood, a title with many different meanings and interpretations, she has for the first time made a series of portraits.
"A strong narrative component has always been central in my work. With these nineteen portraits the narrative is being explored in a new way. There is now a close encounter with the women who inhabit my paintings. The entrance to the narrative is always found in the faces of my characters. It's the starting point and a way for me to get to know their personalities. Once their personalities are established I am able to dress them and move forward with the development of the narrative. Normally their faces are about the size of a thumbprint and the viewer must come very close to the painting to see their expressions. With this new shift in scale the heads are close to life size, making it feel as if the women have stepped forward to greet the viewer. For me this gives the women a sense of animation. They are now able to exist in both worlds. With this series of portraits I am able to go deeper into the psyche of each woman. Being surrounded by this group of portraits I felt I had stepped into the narrative. Their individual personalities dictated my perception of how they functioned as a group. At first I had the notion that they were all members of a religious sect or an organized labor union. But as with my other paintings their personalities dictated what direction they needed to move in. They all spoke to me individually and protested against a uniform. So the result was a group of individual women who are bound together by their stubborn independence and unwillingness to conform."
Amy Cutler - August 15, 2011
Amy Cutler was born in 1974 in Poughkeepsie, New York. She is represented by Leslie Tonkonow Artwork+Projects in New York. Past solo exhibitions of her work includes Site Santa Fe, USA (2010), Weatherspoon Art Museum, USA (2010), Bowdoin College Museum of Art, USA (2008), Museo Nacional Reina Sofía, Spain (2007), Indianapolis Museum of Art (2006), Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art, Kansas City (2004) and the Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia (2002). She has also participated in a two-person exhibition at the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis (2002) and in group exhibitions as I-Lands, Kunsthallen Brandts, Denmark (2009), Darger-ism: Contemporary Artists and Henry Darger, American Folk Art Museum, USA (2008), Global Feminisms, the Brooklyn Museum (2007); ARS 06, KIASMA, Museum of Contemporary Art, Helsinki; and the Whitney Biennial (2004). Works by Amy Cutler are in the collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art; The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), New York; the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; the Indianapolis Museum of Art, and other major institutions.
A new monograph, Amy Cutler: Turtle Fur, has recently been published by Hatje Cantz. (176 pages. 80 color illustrations. Introduction by Laura Steward. Interview with the artist and a short story by Aimee Bender).
For the exhibition Brood we are publishing a catalogue of 32 pages presenting the full series of portraits in 1:1.
