Amy Lincoln- Through the Window

For Immediate Release:

Amy Lincoln: Through the Window

House Gallery

29 East 400 South

Salt Lake City, UT 84111

801-910-1731

www.housegalleryslc.com

Dates: April 5- April 30

Artist Reception: Friday April 15, 6-9pm

House Gallery is pleased to present Through the Window, an exhibition of new work by Brooklyn-based artist Amy Lincoln. This is Lincoln’s first solo show with the gallery, and the first time her work will appear in Salt Lake City. Through the Window opens April 5th and continues through April 30th. An artist’s reception will be held on April 15th, from 6-9 PM.

Contemplative to an extreme, each of Lincoln’s paintings depicts a view of the inside of the artist’s apartment, equating tangible interior space with the less tangible interior of the subconscious. Intimately sized and carefully composed, the paintings have an illustrative quality that resonates with the more sophisticated of graphic novels—Alison Bechdel and Marjane Satrapi come to mind—but they also have an intentional seriousness, channeling the inspired still lifes of the Northern Renaissance. Lincoln’s Brooklyn Still Life in particular, with its preternaturally spaced items and low-hung mirror, looks like something Jan Van Eyck might have arranged. Yet Van Eyck would have used far less blue and green than Lincoln, who relies on her cool palette to give the work its aloofly introspective aura.

Despite a hand that reaches in to pull back a curtain in Through the Window, a cool image with a large garden window at its center, the only human likenesses in Lincoln’s paintings are in mirrors, picture frames, or drawings left on tables. Lincoln has called these portholes into the subconscious, and the image of an un-smiling but attentive brownhaired girl that appears on or in them her avatar in the two-dimensional world.

Interiority and exteriority diverge and converge in Lincoln’s work, and looking out and looking in are occasionally interchangeable—in Loft Garden, for instance, we’re gazing at a gorgeously arranged assortment of hanging and standing potted plants while Lincoln’s 2-D avatar stares back at us from inside a blue-rimmed frame. We’re gazing in at her as she gazes out.

Through the Window engages states of mind; it’s about the thoughtfulness and self-awareness that creativity requires, but it’s also about the timeworn history of art as a space of contemplation, a space in which time slows to a near stop and the laws of nature are suspended. In space like that, imagination and reality can become difficult to tell apart.

Lincoln holds a B.A. from UC Davis, a Post-Baccalaureate Certificate from Brandeis University, and an M.F.A. from Temple University. She has exhibited at NurtureArt, Storefront Gallery, Camel Art Space Michael Steinberg Fine Art, and Thierry Goldberg Projects, and recently participated in group exhibitions at West L.A. College and the Nexus Foundation in Philadelphia.