AMY PLEASANT

ECHO

Exhibition Details

January 16 – May 30

Artist reception : Thursday, January 16, 2020, 6:30–8:30 PM

Please join Laney Contemporary Fine Art for an exhibition of new work by Birmingham-based artist Amy Pleasant opening January 16th. The exhibition has been extended with a new closing date to be announced. Pleasant maneuvers with ease between drawing, painting, ceramic sculpture, and installation; between small and large-scale compositions commanding equal visual attention and gravitas. Her calligraphic forms dissolve the barriers between figuration and abstraction, exploring the body as simplified, yet loaded, narrative gestures, full of implied humanity. Elbows, feet, touching toes, a gentle curve, all bodily expressions become linguistic ones, like letters generating the visual words of a poem. Parts of the body interact through repetition, emphasis, simplicity, and suggestion. Little memories of touch or familiarity emerge. 

Amy Pleasant’s work intuits the one and the many. The images delight in the tender articulations of the human body as individuated by gestures and slouches, tiny flaws and distinguishing marks. Reclining Figure XVIII (oil on canvas, 2019), for instance, is someone and everyone simultaneously in its silhouetted, non-gendered, non-specificity. Yet its sensitive expression points to a single person, a quirk in behavior, an ephemeral moment, there and then gone.

Pleasant earned her BFA from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago and an MFA from The Tyler School of Art at Temple University in Philadelphia. She has exhibited throughout the United States and recently received a 2019 Alabama State Council for the Arts Individual Artist Fellowship and was a 2018 John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellow. Her first monograph was just published in collaboration with Institute 193 and Frank. She recently participated in the 2019 Atlanta Biennial A Thousand Tomorrows co-curated by Daniel Fuller and Phillip March Jones. Pleasant’s solo exhibitions include Geary Contemporary, New York, Jeff Bailey Gallery, New York City and Hudson, New York, whitespace gallery in Atlanta, Indianapolis Museum of Contemporary Art, Birmingham Museum of Art, Alabama, and Atlanta Contemporary. Her work has been reviewed in Art Forum, Art Papers, Burnaway, The Brooklyn Rail, and Art in America, among others.