ART CITIES:Berlin-Amy Feldman

Amy Feldman is an abstract painter known for her loosely geometric figures set against areas of bare canvas. The same geometric figures activate the ground, dispelling any metaphors of the mechanical. Feldman is captivated by figure/ground relationships and negotiating the space between them, the space that flips between something and nothing. She is interested in highlighting the areas between figure and ground that might be ignored.

By Efi Michalarou
Photo: Blain|Southern Gallery Archive

In “Breath Myth” her first solo exhibition, Amy Feldman presents at Blain|Southern Gallery in Berlin a group of entirely new paintings. Her back-to-back basics abstraction, characterized by simple forms and minimal color, puts emphasis on the process behind the paintings. Feldman’s process ensues from a vague vision of the finished work and entails thumbnail sketches, taping the shapes onto the canvas, and finally, painting. The images evolve considerably along the way as she seeks to retain the casualness of her preliminary sketches, often based on her surroundings, yet she also strives for poise. She feels the unfinished quality in her work is in dialogue with the landscape – the forms are carefully articulated yet under-polished. Starting with a preparatory sketch in marker pen, Feldman makes each painting in a single performative take. Giving herself just one chance to get it right, the associated risk and anxiety play an important part in her aim to communicate urgency in her painting. Consistently working in just shades of grey, Feldman has developed an abstract sign system that alludes to systems of writing and the transmission of information. With this reduced palette, she also aims to strip away associations and limitations that many colours would introduce to the painting. Similarly, the bulbous, sketchy and irregular forms that she paints are just familiar enough to be reminiscent yet – as with her colour palette – elusive enough to dodge literal decoding. Yet a clear allusion to the body and to Feldman’s position as female painter persists in the work. As the artist has explained, each canvas consists of multiple layers of shapes and marks that coalesce into the final, pared down forms. This underpainting, only occasionally visible, tugs on the viewer’s imagination, suggesting unknowable iterations of the image below. It is as if an invisible level of extravagance has undergirded the work’s seeming simplicity.

Info: Blain|Southern Gallery, Potsdamer Straße 77–87, Berlin, Duration: 11/2-8/4/17, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 11:00-18:00, www.blainsouthern.com