AMY TALLUTO: The Grape of the Air  - ARTFORUM CRITICS' PICKS
Recent paintings & gouaches

February 23 - April 1, 2018

Black & White Gallery is proud to present THE GRAPE OF THE AIR - a remarkable new series of paintings and gouaches by Amy Talluto. The title references Eudora Welty's description of the landscape in the short story "Moon Lake." The story describes the night sky as "pale as a green grape, transparent as grape flesh over each tree" ... "the grape of the air." The paintings grow out of the lush, dense, deep woods portrayals in the story and present images of nature that seem filtered through an emerald glass. Each painting sits on the boundary of night's blackness and daytime's sunlight, distilled through a prism of green.

Talluto renders her landscapes through the lens of a contemporary painter. Far from traditional studies of landscape and environment, these works not only depict but also exude a world that is as dark as it is magical, as elusive as it is recognizable. Strangely bereft of human life, the paintings navigate the real and imagined; fusing passing and changing landscape, a monument to the earth itself and a poetic sense of place.

ARTIST'S STATEMENT
I work exclusively with landscape in my oil on canvas paintings, using that theme as a platform to explore new ways of representing space and form. I am also interested in using psychological content and color to investigate the impact of nature, and natural space on the mind. Individual works describe scenes that are sometimes bright, lush and flowering, or sometimes dissonant, murky and foreboding. Tree branches twist and writhe, color turns acidic,and sky flattens to meet form and then deepens back into space again. A shifting psychological mood pervades the group as a whole, moving between realms of sparkling beauty, anxiety, and the sinister and mysterious.

ABOUT THE ARTIST
Amy Talluto (born in New Orleans in 1973) lives and works both in Brooklyn and in Upstate NY. She earned her BFA from Washington University in St. Louis in 1995 and her MFA from the School of Visual Arts in New York in 2001. She has shown her paintings across the country, especially in New York and Chicago. She has recently had solo shows at Jeff Bailey Gallery (Hudson), Roos Arts (Rosendale), Black & White Gallery (Brooklyn) and Packer Schopf Gallery (Chicago). Previous shows include a two-person exhibition at PS 122 Gallery in New York, and several group shows, including exhibitions at the Samuel Dorsky Museum in New Paltz, NY, Geoffrey Young Gallery in Great Barrington, MA, Wave Hill Gardens in the Bronx; Field Projects and the Abrons Art Center in New York; and Kentler International Drawing Center in Brooklyn. She has been a resident artist at the Provincetown Dune Shacks, Ucross Foundation in Wyoming and Byrdcliffe in Woodstock, NY.

The Grape of the Air is Talluto's second solo exhibition at Black & White Gallery.

LIST OF WORKS