Manhattan Up, 2023

Amy Nelder   New & remarkable Artists

Amy Nelder is a versatile painter of diverse genres, who has been engaged in the last 13 years with contemporary still-life painting she calls “Pop Trompe L'eoil", as well as, in recent years, an empowering partner-series about bodily and psychic autonomy she paints with her daughter called “That's NOT My Name (Honey/Baby/Sugar)".

Critics and art writers have credited Nelder with radically updating the nature of today's still life to leave behind what one might call the hackneyed, old-fashioned subject matter of yore – bunches of grapes and flowers, for example – to replace it with hip, debonair, au courant imagery. While Old Master still lifes may fetch millions of dollars, executed in the most expert and astonishing ways, the time has come, these observers claim, for the still life to speak to today's audience in today's effervescent language. Timothy Anglin-Burgard refers to Nelder's “wonderful tension" in the de Young Museum's virtual tour of 2020's “De Young Open" exhibition", in which Amy's “Apples & Honey, 2020" was a featured work.

Nelder meets the challenge with this past year's Covid19 series as well as the past 13 years of her Pop-oriented, romance-skewed scenes of domestic life, wherein lipstick-kissed wine glasses and haute couture meet Scrabble boards, cereal boxes, and the mess of baking chocolate chip cookies. Her more romantic portraits are often of a blissful couple navigating the realities of domestic life is recorded with a kind of hipster synecdoche – the Greek concept in poetics of using stand-in symbols to represent a bigger, more meaningful whole. More recently, working-motherhood, Covid19, and empowering pro-femme dialogues have dominated her pop still lifes in an elegant dovetailing dance with the “That's NOT My Name" works she creates with her daughter.

Here is a truly superb draughtsman, who can draw like an Old Master, while at the same time delivering a still life genre that is all about the here and now. In her San Francisco studio, one is treated to seeing Nelder's actual still life props, set up on a table. Watching her transmit the model's image to canvas with stunning realist accuracy is both fascinating and uncanny. She purposely seems to pick the hardest subject matter to conquer: sterling silver, glass with its many-faceted reflective qualities, elaborate typefaces curving round bottles, and the like. Here is a Raphael realist, whose subject ranges from a tongue in cheek dialogue about the current pandemic, to a pop-fueled cupidity, pulled off with amazing chic and glamour, yet as down to earth as your last date.