Exhibitions
AMY PLEASANT: FOLDING
Tops Gallery at Madison Avenue Park / 151 Madison Ave. May 20, 2023 - September 16, 2023
Amy Pleasant
Tops is pleased to present Folding, a site specific wall drawing by Amy Pleasant at our Madison Avenue Park gallery.
Folding consists of twelve silhouetted human forms that depict arms enveloping their heads. From realistically rendered to near complete abstraction, the universal glyph-like symbols comprise a storyboard of interior concentration and protection: the body collapsing in on itself. Transcribed from her drawings, the enlarged figures in Pleasant’s Folding maintain the immediacy and graceful economy of their source.
Flat and featureless these figures are freed from the specificity of time and place. Presented in a space that is both private and public, the variations of Pleasant's forms meet both intentional and circumstantial viewers with a code that is familiar yet indecipherable.
Amy Pleasant is an artist based in Birmingham, AL. Recent solo exhibitions include the Birmingham Museum of Art, Birmingham, AL (forthcoming 2023), Hunter Museum of American Art Chattanooga, TN (2022), Brackett Creek Editions, NYC (2022) Geary Contemporary, Millerton/NYC (2021,2019), Laney Contemporary, Savannah, GA (2020), Institute 193, Lexington, KY(2019). Recent two person and group exhibitions at venues such as Pamela Salisbury Gallery, Hudson, NY (2022), Knoxville Museum of Art, Knoxville, TN (2022), Zuckerman Museum of Art, Kennesaw, GA (2022,), Brackett Creek Editions, Bozeman, MT (2022, 2021), Hesse Flatow, NYC (2021), SEPTEMBER, Hudson, NY (2020), Mindy Solomon Gallery, Miami, FL (2019), Tif Sigfrids, Athens, GA (2019) Pleasant was awarded a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship (2018), Joan Mitchell Foundation Painters and Sculptors Award (2015). Pleasant received an MFA from Tyler School of Art, and a BFA from School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Her first monograph, The Messenger’s Mouth Was Heavy, was released in 2019, co-published by Institute 193 and Frank.
