From press release:
Miles McEnery Gallery is pleased to announce Shelter, an exhibition of seventeen new paintings by Amy Bennett. The exhibition opens Thursday 16 May and remains on view through 3 July 2024 at 525 West 22nd Street. Accompanying the exhibition is a fully illustrated publication featuring essays by Robert Long Foreman and Elizabeth Buhe.
Small in scale but dense in narrative, the paintings in Shelter function akin to a short story. Each oil on panel work encapsulates a snapshot still of a moment, prompting the viewer to draw upon one’s own lived experience to flesh out the lead up and its aftermath. Teetering between subjective realities and familiar memories, Bennett mitigates serene compositions with the unsettling: a sunbather lounges under the moon, a sleepwalker drifts through the home, a family gathers for breakfast in a flooded kitchenette.
Rather than painting from memory or photographs, Bennett begins her process by building miniature models. Vignettes of sprawling nature preserves and domestic interiors set the scene for figurines dressed in custom tinfoil garments frozen in place. Elizabeth Buhe writes, “Bennett’s works are not just technically brilliant repositories of painted form; they are texts that query the circulation and sedimentation of images, or perhaps memories, and how these come to snap us.”
AMY BENNETT (b. 1977 in Portland, ME) received her Bachelor of Fine Arts degree in 1999 from the University of Hartford and her Master of Fine Arts in 2002 from the New York Academy of Art.
Bennett has been the subject of recent solo exhibitions at Richard Heller Gallery, Los Angeles, CA; Galleri Magnus Karlsson, Stockholm, Sweden; Miles McEnery Gallery, New York, NY; Brattleboro Museum & Art Center, Brattleboro, VT; MTA Arts & Design, Brooklyn, NY; and Tomio Koyama Gallery, Tokyo, Japan.
Her work has been included in recent group exhibitions at The National Museum of Toys and Miniatures, Kansas City, MO; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, MA; New York Academy of Art, New York, NY; Southampton Arts Center, Southampton, NY; American Academy of Arts and Letters, New York, NY; The Bruce Museum, Greenwich, CT; and The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY.
Bennett is the recipient of awards and accolades including the New York State Council on the Arts/New York Foundation for the Arts Artist Fellowship; John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship in Fine Arts; Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant; American Academy of Arts & Letters Purchase Award, among others.
Her work is included in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY and the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, MA.
Bennett lives and works in Cold Spring, NY.
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