D’Amelio Terras, New York
September 7 – October 2, 2004
D’Amelio Terras is pleased to present “New Season, New Girls, New Looks,” the debut New York solo exhibition of Rotterdam-based artist Amie Dicke. The exhibition will consist of new, variously scaled cutout works that use fashion imagery—from magazine spreads to bus shelter advertisements—as source material. With an X-Acto knife and ink, Dicke transforms these pictures of brazenly self-confident women into phantom traces of their perfected photo shoot selves.
These works invert the artist’s earlier sculptural casts of the negative space between her legs. In each work, large swaths of the models’ bodies and of decorative background elements are excised, leaving behind a network of filigreed lines that calls to mind veins, wax drippings from devotional candles, lace, or river systems winding through a landscape. Left untouched, lips, hair, hands, and feet—never eyes, which could stare back at you—are estranged from the rest of the body, floating alone among sinuous abstract lines. Dicke explores volume by contrasting solid and void, presence and absence; and, as each work rests slightly off the wall, the third dimension of sculpture is hinted at by shadows that give the figures a halo of color. Calling to mind Arturo Herrera and Julie Verhoeven, Dicke’s haunting figures return “depth” to the surface sheen of fashion shoots, and the resultant dark undertones sully the relentless empty optimism of her source images.
Amie Dicke has recently presented solo exhibitions at Peres Projects, Los Angeles and Fries Museum, Buro Leeuwarden, The Netherlands. Her work has previously been seen in New York at D’Amelio Terras and John Connelly Presents. Concurrent with this exhibition, a 265 page illustrated catalogue titled Void is being published by Artimo and will be available for sale through the gallery.
