Body Map

In Baby Step, 2024, a dark sky frames a foot with two blue cherries stacked between its big and index toes. Zoom out and a universe of these introspective, navel-gazing moments dilate in profound, porous paintings in various states of repose. Amanda Wall’s self-portraits unfurl within rooms of their own, taking up space, examining their posteriors, and extending beyond the frame.

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In “Sky got dark,” Wall’s fourth solo exhibition with Almine Rech, the artist is at her most vulnerable and introspective self. The exhibition marks her New York debut and her first to consist exclusively of works with the artist as subject—a response to “a culture obsessed with identity and self-narrative,” she tells me. The decision to use herself as a model was a natural development, she explains, and the only way she could direct while also capturing a sense of exhibitionism and voyeurism. “I've tried to recreate it with other people, and something always gets lost,” Wall reflects. “There’s a self-awareness that happens when you take a photo of someone else.” 

Lips, hands, feet exposed, parted mouths miming the psyche. Bent knees and bare butts. bright secondary colors framed by murky shadows. In Wall’s new works, her body wilts and blooms: caught in various states of undress, contorting and reclining, hazy, porous, and sunset-tinged. In Tights Purple Sky, 2024, the painter leans back, black tights-clad knees caught mid-motion, pulling back from her chest. Her arm reaches between her legs, and her eyes seem to gaze somewhere off into the distance. A neon pink and Jacaranda-hued horizon glows behind her, as if she is transporting to a higher plane or spacing out. These private poses and interiors are fertile ground to explore the nuances of what it means to simply exist outside of any kind of outside gaze.

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Wall’s paintings scratch the itch of a certain kind of solitude: bodies lean forward to explore themselves in various states of undress, performing for no one besides themselves—a contrast to public life both online and in Wall’s Los Angeles—what she likens to a giant stage. She learned to paint on the floor of her Arts District apartment, and now it is there that she sets up her iPhone camera to capture what later become her evocative self-portraits. In her new work, Wall comes into focus as a singular artist and a collector of objects, metabolized and reproduced across her ineffable paintings. She expands and doubles down on her own visual language of bodies, fruit, bows, tights, candles, and cigarettes.

“I'm so new at painting that I'm still figuring this shit out,” she says humbly. Yet, while she only began showing her paintings in 2021, the artist has been honing her eye since she was a 10-year-old who spent her afternoons replicating Monet and Georgia O'Keeffe’s flowers and making stop motion animation with dolls. In college, she studied interior architecture and design and modeled on the side. Then it was casting, styling, art direction, packaging design, a stint as a creative director of a hair brand… “If I'm looking back at all of the things that I've done to get to where I am now, it was always all in the pursuit of creating an image,” she observes. In the three years since, Wall’s career has skyrocketed with solo shows in Paris, London, and now New York. What’s next for the artist? “I'm in full on painting-focus-mode right now. I'm letting it consume me,” she says. “It's a real possession.” 

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Amanda Wall: “Sky Got Dark” is on view from June 26 to August  2, 2024 at Almine Rech at 39 E 78th St, New York, NY 10075.