Amanda Baldwin. Wild Weeds

About

Public Gallery is pleased to present Wild Weeds, a solo exhibition by New York based artist Amanda Baldwin, marking her first presentation with the gallery and in the UK. The exhibition comprises nine new paintings – rhythmic landscapes which linger with uncertainty, dislocated from reality in both their mathematical construction and hyperpigmented colour palette.

Assembling overlapping structures, patterns and textures in precise harmonious synchrony across a procession of flat planes, Baldwin toys with our perception of pictorial depth, as if opening a window to unknown realities. In Burning The Breeze (2023), poppy blue and sickly green trees bathe in an ocean of orange light, the tree line parting at the centre of the composition where the ocean ripples in red waves. Welcoming the pleasurable dislocation of such unfamiliar seascapes, Baldwin asks the viewer to consider the internal and external in tandem, following the legacy of artists like Ithell Colquhoun, Georgia O’Keefe, and Eileen Agar. Such quiet disruptions and reflections resist the overstimulation and expedited image consumption of the everyday. Baldwin suggests we slow down time to reflect. In our age of excess, still-life might be a form of resistance.

Baldwin’s geometric landscapes eschew horizon lines and other realistic signifiers in favour of multidimensional depth, inviting the viewer to consider ecology, climate change, mathematics, and colour theory each in turn. Cerulean Monsoon (2023) is one such example, the yellow moon and marbled sky tugging blue and purple tides to the right as if called upon by a lopsided gravitational pull. In the words of New Yorker critic Andrea Scott, Baldwin “toggles between flat and illusionistic space […] and scampers through centuries of tradition, from landscape painting on Chinese porcelain to a convex reflection (a staple of Netherlandish vanitas) to Lichtenstein-like Ben-Day dots.” By bringing into question classical genre painting – and its associated burdens and art historical entanglements – Baldwin’s alternate realities, or perhaps futures, exude a sense of hope, wonder and excitement for the natural world.