The new theatrical space of Amy Lincoln
Amy Lincoln, installation view. Courtesy Sperone Westwater, New York
Originally published by Two Coats of Paint
Contributed by Jason Andrew
Amy Lincoln’s Soaring trajectory has locked in the natural world, the phenomena within it, and the epic world of myth. Ten new paintings now on view at Sperone Westwater embrace these pervasive elements while exploring a bold new theatrical space.
I first met Lincoln well over a decade ago and have curated several shows that included her work. As a recent grad of Tyler School of Art (Stanley Whitney was one of her instructors), she had just returned from short teaching stint in Yokohama, Japan, and was living in a fourth-floor walkup loft above a laundromat at Melrose and Central in Bushwick. A bunch of artists had landed there including Jesse Bercowetz, Ianthe Jackson, Kevin Curran (now married to Lincoln), and Ben Godward. They were part of the genesis of Bushwick’s nascent but growing art scene, and Lincoln was its Henri Rousseau.
She has always had a highly stylized approach to her work. Even back then, we came to appreciate her offset proportions, one-point perspective, and use of sharp chromatic color in her small portraits of friends, still lifes of plants, and well-placed interiors on MDF. Lincoln’s distinctive approach to painting bordered on the primitive, leaving one with a sense of mystery and eccentricity.
As the complexity of her paintings grew, they moved beyond mere observation into the realm of phenomenology and meaning. Her panels expanded to include landscapes teeming with flora and fauna bathed in the sun, the stars, the moon, or a combination of the three. By resolutely skirting human truths and contradictions in terms of imagery, her work paradoxically seemed to embrace them remotely in suggesting themes such as urban isolation and alienation.
“I find myself trying to figure out how realistic things should be versus imaginatively depicted,” Lincoln said in a 2019 interview with Maria Vogel. “I think whatever makes the painting more compelling is what I try to choose. There’s a range within a painting. Some things are more realistic, other things more like symbols.”
