PRESENTATION: Amy Feldman-Good Fortune

Amy Feldman is recognized for her iconic painting language and commitment to large-scale gray-on-gray abstractions. Feldman’s investigation in the color gray highlights the significance and potential that can be found in neutrality—how something can appear neutral but is, in fact, charged with great power of expression. Feldman typically works in series, presenting distilled iterations of unique forms, which relate to how images and signs are quickly interpreted, remembered, and misremembered.

By Dimitris Lempesis
Photo: Galerie Eva Presenhuber Archive

Amy Feldman, after 15 years of exploring the nuances of grey—capturing the infinite variations between light and dark—has entered her blue period. She now works in cerulean and Prussian blue, shades of azure and cobalt. Her solo exhibition, “Good Fortune”, celebrates this devotion to blue, honoring its divinity as a color and its sublime presence in the sea and sky visible from her studio windows. In this exploration, Feldman aligns herself with a lineage of artists—from Picasso and Yves Klein to Derek Jarman and Maggie Nelson—who have answered blue’s evocative call. Feldman frequently works in series, using repetition to investigate how form and color shift between similarity and difference, teasing out what defines those distinctions. For this exhibition, she draws inspiration from the block print textiles worn by the women in Gustav Klimt’s portraits, adopting techniques akin to textile design. Her process involves screen-printed images of canvas as a base, overlaid with digitally manipulated impressions made from hand-carved potato stamps. These stamps begin to decay almost immediately, marking the passage of time in the physicality of her work. The shrinking, rotting potatoes leave impressions that transform over time, evolving from their original shapes into something entirely new. This metamorphosis, though real, happens subtly, blurring the moment when change occurs—much like the gradual transformation of a body through time. In her work, Feldman challenges the concept of truth. Observing traces of time’s effects—be it on a body or a material—questions the certainty of what we perceive as true in any given moment. Surfaces that seem textured are actually smooth, and forms that suggest dimension are flat. Feldman draws inspiration from Bleigiessen, a New Year’s tradition in German-speaking countries where molten lead poured into water creates solid abstractions, interpreted as predictions for the year ahead. To Feldman, this tradition mirrors her artistic process: through repetition and constraint, a final variation emerges, embodying a truth that demands interpretation. This interest in control and constraint extends to broader questions about autonomy—how much control do we have over our bodies and lives? How do attempts to impose control reveal truths, or lead us astray? These questions resonate in works like “Celestial Screen”, “Wonder Margin”, and “Magic Matter”, created specifically for wintertime Vienna. Their forms suggest snow falling, random yet recognizable, dissolving into abstraction. In larger works like “Good Fortune” and “Sky Secret”, these impermanent forms take on new boldness, shifting between fleeting and dominant. Throughout the exhibition, Feldman plays with perceptions, blending background and foreground to subvert static interpretations. Bodies, once covertly encoded in her abstractions, begin to emerge as rudimentary faces—an unexpected hint of representation. Yet, Feldman remains firmly rooted in abstraction, navigating the space between opposites. Her work prompts viewers to question what they know, what they think they know, and where the boundary between the two truly lies.

Photo: Amy Feldman, Love Charms, 2024, Ink on paper Sheet. 28 x 38 cm / 11 x 15 in. Frame 35 x 45 x 4 cm / 13 3/4 x 17 3/4 x 1 5/8 in, © Amy Feldman, Courtesy the artist and Galerie Eva Presenhuber

Info: Galerie Eva Presenhuber, Lichtenfelsgasse 5, Vienna, Austria, Duration: 16/1-8/3/2024, Days & Hours: Tue-Fri 11:00-18:00, Sat 11:00-15:00, www.presenhuber.com/