Artwork of the 80's
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Artists & Works

Gregory Amenoff
American (b. 1948)
MANDORLA (1986)
oil on canvas
80" x 82.25"
STYLE: biomorphic abstraction ©Gregory Amenoff

The simplified, heavily painted shapes of Mandorla form a visionary landscape that makes slight reference to the forms of nature. Like an unfamiliar map, Amenoff's work is faithful to its peculiar organization—shapes do not overflow into each other; brushstrokes are heavy but not slashingly expressive. To find a way out of this labyrinth, the viewer must inform it with his or her own sensibilities, finding an interpretation that is most responsive to his or her own particular frame of mind.

The most accessible starting point in this painting is nature. Like Charles Burchfield or Arthur Dove, Amenoff bends the rules to conform to ideas of geometry and abstract space, as well as to the demands of landscape. Amenoff, like many other painters of the last two decades, has taken the revolutionary Modernist landscape several steps further, into a realm which fulfills the needs of the artist as well as the viewer and the scene.

Nature becomes reference rather than subject matter in the hands of painters like Gregory Amenoff. In this way, artists can paint the world at the same time they assert their individual languages of form and expression.

CRITICAL EXCERPTS
Susan Kandel and Elizabeth Hayt-Atkins, ARTnews, 10/87
"The cataclysmic forces of nature inspire Gregory Amenoff to explore meteorology, biology, and botany and to wed science to mysticism. In his current work, a visceral response to the ecosphere generates grand and passionate paintings filled with organic imagery. Single-celled biomorphs, spores, and pods coexist with the spiraling vortices of hurricanes, the torrential rush of waterfalls, and the gaseous fumes emanating from the earth's core. The work is about '....the body. Chest. Diaphragm. Gut. Stomach.'...The energy of the brushwork—gnarling, sweeping, pumping, and pulsating—echoes the dynamism of the natural forms...Kandinsky-like arabesques superimposed upon the surface of the landscape create structure and a sense of topography..."
Eleanor Heartney, ARTnews, 12/83
"...these worlds are thick and airless, all solid and no void, places where the negative space between elements pushes forward and all but overwhelms them...In these paintings, Amenoff reaches back to the abstract-landscape tradition of Arthur Dove and Albert Pinkham Ryder to create a nonfigurative Neo-Expressionism...Working at one remove from his ultimate subject, Amenoff manages to infuse these works with a power and complexity that more obvious symbolism might have trivialized."
John Yau, ARTFORUM, 9/87
"He is considered to be in forefront of the ranks of abstract artists who address the mythic qualities of landscape while aligning themselves with early Modernists such as Arthur Dove and Charles Burchfield...By continually pointing to the visionary landscape tradition, these critics have overlooked the scope of Amenoff's ambition...his painted shapes now make at best a tenuous reference to the natural world...In his work , he tries to find something to believe in, however fragile and vulnerable the actual evidence he arrives at may be. Amenoff isn't trying to prove how intelligent and up on the latest criticism he is."

Art in America interview(Lilly Wei), 7/87
"I don't make distinctions between abstract and other forms of painting. The problems and issues of painting remain the same, the nature of the communication is the same, and the process...goes back thousands of years...the fact that human beings want to use painting to communicate, that it is still powerful in the 1980s and that it will still be powerful in future centuries...To spit back what the culture is spitting at us doesn't solve the problem. Like a MacDonald's hamburger, it's empty food with no nourishment...I believe that painting has the power to take on real meaning again and to deliver it into people's lives. What is needed is work based on substantive feelings, thoughts and perspectives...For me, finishing a painting involves believing in the forms enough so that they begin to have the same presence that objects and people have in life...My content varies; it describes an inner world and inner life. It may have an atmosphere and light which portray some notion which touches me at the time. It is also about finding compelling forms which live in a nether world, familiar and unfamiliar, which is connected with nature, the natural world. Atmosphere in what I paint is important to me, a potent atmosphere like a fog you can walk through, where the sense of atmosphere comes up behind you; it doesn't just face you, it comes around you, in back of you. I want to go through the window opened by the American Modernists—Ryder, Hartley, Dove, etc. They developed a direct and innocent form of expression that is peculiarly American..."