Artists

Amy Feldman

Press release

Anna Bohman Gallery is pleased to present Lady Blues, the gallery's fifth exhibition with New York-based artist Amy Feldman. The exhibition brings together a new body of paintings that continues Feldman's exploration of gesture, the body, and perception, while marking a significant tur toward blue following years of working primarily in gray. In Lady Blues, blue becomes both a subject and a way of thinking about perception. Feldman's paintings blur the distinction between the painted and the printed, the handmade and the reproduced. Her new work investigates how we perceive blue across the natural and the artificial–from the light of the sun to the blue light emitted by screens and electronic devices- bringing this tension between the physical and the reproduced into focus. "Looking at the horizon, sometimes the sea becomes the sky and vice versa. They flip-flop into one another. Both appear blue, yet you cannot hold this color in your hand," Feldman says. "The gray in my work provides a leveling field-a space where difference, contradiction and ambiguity coexist. The blue works hold a quiet gravity in the face of the unknown." Feldman's paintings begin with simple tools and gestures–scribbles, fingerprints, and hand- carved potato stamps–that hover between sign and body. The potatoes are temporary tools, beginning to shrink and deteriorate as soon as they are carved, so that each impression records a particular moment in time. These changing marks are photographed, digitally manipulated, and silkscreened onto canvas. Painted marks and a trompe l'oeil canvas weave are then overlaid, introducing a Surrealist gesture into the surface. Feldman asks the viewer to temporarily accept the fiction of the surface, much as we accept the enigmatic potential of blue, as something we perceive rather than something we can physically possess. "I am drawn to this unpredictability; it becomes a meditation on time, and the fleeting traces of human touch." The paintings in Lady Blues evoke the nervous system–the body's responses to sensation, stress, pleasure, and the passage of time–and reflect Feldman's experience of motherhood, which becomes a source of both humor and material. Forms resembling organs, clocks, hourglasses, and even a tooth appear as fragments of a bodily vocabulary, registering the ways we carry time and experience in the body. Lady Blues brings these threads together, with "Lady" invoking the female body and the artist's lived experience, while "Blues" speaks simultaneously to the color, to feeling blue, and to the possibility of putting the blues to work. The result is a body of paintings that is both playful and visceral, using abstraction to make visible the fleeting, sometimes absurd experience of inhabiting a body and moving through time. AMY FELDMAN (1981) lives and works in New York, NY, US. Feldman received her Bachelor of Fine Arts from the Rhode Island School of Design, Providence, RI, US (2003); and her Master of Fine Arts from Rutgers University, New Brunswick, NJ, US (2008). She is the recipient of The Joan Mitchell Foundation Grant (2013); The John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship (2018); The Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant (2021). Recent solo exhibitions were presented at Galerie Eva Presenhuber, Vienna, AT (2025), Kunz Knust Munich, DE; Anna Bohman, Stockholm, SE (2023); Galerie Eva Presenhuber, Zurich, CH (2022); Eva Presenhuber, New York, NY, US (2021); The Journal, New York, NY, US (2019); James Cohan Gallery, New York, NY (2017); Blain Souther, Berlin, DE (2017); Ratio 3, San Francisco, CA, US (2016); and Corbett vs Dempsey, Chicago, IL, US (2016). Feldman participated in group exhibitions at Lenbachhaus, Munich, DE (2025), Heidi Horten Collection Museum (2025), Galerie Eva Presenhuber x TAXA, Seoul, KR (2023); The Hall Art Foundation, Schloss Demeburg Museum, Derneburg, DE (2018); Sheldon Museum of Art, Lincoln, NE, US (2017); Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, IL, US (2017); Rosenwald-Wolf Gallery at The University of the Arts, Philadelphia, PA, US (2017): Kunstmuseum, Bonn, DE (2015); Musée d'art Moderne, St. Etienne, FR (2014). Feldman's work is in the collection of The RISD Museum, Providence, RI, US; The Hall Art Foundation, Schloss Derneburg Museum, Derneburg, DE; Lenbachhaus, Munich, DE; Margulies Foundation, Key Biscayne, FL, US; MCA - Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, IL, US; Princeton University Art Museum, Princeton, NJ, US; Sheldon Museum of Art, Lincoln, NE, US; Städtische Galerie Wolfsburg, Wolfsburg, DE; Vanhaerents Art Collection, Brussels, BE