Amanda Baldwin US, b. 1984

Through overlays of simple shapes and rich colors, Amanda Baldwin (b. 1984, Seattle, WA) portrays landscapes and still lifes that explore the subtle balance between chaos and order, the organic and inorganic, and realistic and surreal. Influenced by classical genre painting, Baldwin presents the contemporary potential of a still life and reveals—while disrupting—shifts in our assumed realities.

 

While traditional still life paintings offered new ways of looking at daily life and ordinary objects around us, Baldwin considers a contemporary approach, reconstructing these objects as vessels for disruption and reflection. With her cooler color palette and textural surfaces, Baldwin evokes a sense of decay and distance within her works. Though seemingly literal, upon closer inspection, each object in Baldwin’s paintings possess different colors, patterns, compositions, textures, and perspectives. Allowing each object to determine and lead composition, the artist creates depth and layers without sequence, creating a cohesive incongruous image. By altering methods of depiction, Baldwin expands the art historical canon of traditional modes of representation in landscape and still life painting.

 

Providing both a micro- and macroscopic perspective found in the patterns and rhythms of daily life, Baldwin challenges viewers to question the subtle shifts in their own process of viewing and assumed realities and rewards those who give time for the works to unfold and reveal themselves. Through the visual disruptions within her works, Baldwin offers an exchange; inviting viewers to look closer, she reveals a reality so subtle that it becomes not only a reflection but a form of truth itself.

 

Born in Seattle, Washington, Baldwin received an MFA from Virginia Commonwealth University and a BFA from the University of Washington, Seattle. The artist has had solo shows at Galerie Marguo (Paris, France), HESSE FLATOW (New York, NY), Thierry Goldberg Gallery (New York, NY), 106 Green Gallery (Brooklyn, NY), and the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts (Richmond, VA).

 

Baldwin currently lives and works in Queens, NY.