We are extremely pleased to announce our fifth one-person presentation of works by Amy Cutler. The exhibition explores the artist's involvement in the printmaking process, featuring etchings and lithographs created since 2003, as well as a selection of paintings, drawings, and sculpture that inspired them. Working drawings, sketches, hand-colored proofs, trial prints, etched plates, and photographs will also be on view.
Amy Cutler is internationally known for exquisitely detailed narrative works of art created through a pastiche of memories, observations, and cultural references. Populated mostly by female figures who perform enigmatic tasks and engage in impossible situations, Cutler's works expose the emotional complexities of real life within a richly imagined universe.
Amy Cutler began to exhibit her drawings and paintings shortly after graduating from The Cooper Union School of Art in 1997. Her first prints, created in 2003 during a publishing residency at the Lower East Side Printshop in New York City, were monochromatic etchings with aquatint and chine collé, that replicated the surreal complexity of her paintings in gouache on paper. Since 2004, she has been working regularly at Universal Limited Art Editions (ULAE), the highly esteemed print publisher founded in 1957 by Tatyana Grosman. Cutler’s first work produced at ULAE was Cake Toss (2004), a lithograph in ten colors that appeared on the cover of Art on Paper’s First Annual New Prints Review in November of that year. In 2007, working at ULAE, she made four unique hand-colored lithographs that were conceived for the exhibition of Alterations (2007), a major sculptural installation that was commissioned, exhibited, and later acquired by the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía in Madrid. The exhibition will feature Cutler’s original drawings and proofs for that set as well as the four related lithographs in 17 colors that were published the following year. Photographic tableaux made by the artist during the production of Alterations, will also be on view.
Amy Cutler’s haunting images appear and reappear in a variety of manifestations throughout the exhibition. Floppy pink bunnies emerge in place of hands from the sleeves of Gingham Dress with Rabbits, a sculpture created in 1995. Fifteen years later, they return in Tethered (2010), an intaglio print depicting two girls whose detached heads are intertwined by rope. The barely visible female outcroppings in two delicate watercolors from 2004 are fully realized in Cutler’s painting Above the Fjord (2010), and in her newest print, a large lithograph created during a recent residency at the Tamarind Institute in Albuquerque, New Mexico.
The exhibition also celebrates Amy Cutler: Turtle Fur, a new monograph published by Hatje Cantz, with an introduction by Laura Steward, former director of SITE Santa Fe, an interview conducted by the novelist and short story writer Aimee Bender, and Tiger Mending, Bender's short story, inspired by Cutler's painting and print of the same name.
One-person museum shows of works by Amy Cutler have taken place at SITE Santa Fe; the Indianapolis Museum of Art; the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid; the Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia; the Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art, Kansas City; the Weatherspoon Art Museum, Greensboro, North Carolina, and the Bowdoin College Museum of Art, Brunswick, Maine. She has participated in major survey exhibitions including, among many others, Global Feminisms at the Brooklyn Museum; ARS 06 at KIASMA Museum of Contemporary Art, Helsinki; Greater New York at MoMA PS 1; and the 2004 Whitney Biennial.
Works by the artist are included in such distinguished public collections as The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA); the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid; the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; the Indianapolis Museum of Art; the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; the Weatherspoon Art Museum, Greensboro, NC; the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, and many others.
A one-person survey of Amy Cutler's prints will take place from March 17 through May 13, 2012 as part of the Walter Gropius Master Artist Series at the Huntington Museum of Art, Huntington, West Virginia. A solo show of new works by the artist will be on view from September 1 through October 2, 2011 at Galleri Magnus Karlsson, Stockholm.
Leslie Tonkonow Artworks + Projects is located on the 6th floor of 535 West 22nd Street, between Tenth and Eleventh Avenues. Regular gallery hours are Tuesday through Saturday, 10:00 a.m. to 6:00 p.m.