The enigmatic imagery of Amy Cutler�s paintings and drawings is transformed into three dimensions in her first major work of sculpture. Alterations consists of 120 cast and painted female figures placed on top of and around a long wooden table.
The figures placed along the perimeter of the tabletop were cast wearing corduroy dresses and clogs, sitting on round stools wrapped with braided hair, with their arms extended in front of them. A complex web of strings wrapped around their arms connects each sculpture to a corresponding unraveling figure on the floor. These hydrocal casts feature the exquisite detail characteristic of all of Amy Cutler's work. Having painted the individual faces in gouache, Cutler renders each with a separate character and expression. A solitary lamp hanging from the ceiling illuminates the emotional theater in this poignant interplay of shadow and form.
Alterations was commissioned by the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sof�a in Madrid, and exhibited there from July 3 through September 10, 2007. The work will enter the museum�s permanent collection at the close of this special New York presentation. Four unique hand-colored lithographs, created for the installation in Spain, will also be on view.
Amy Cutler was born in 1974 in Poughkeepsie, New York. Past exhibitions of her work have included a major survey at the Indianapolis Museum of Art (2006) and solo shows at the Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art, Kansas City (2004), and the Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia (2002). She has also participated in a two-person exhibition at the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis (2002) and in such important group exhibitions as Global Feminisms, the Brooklyn Museum (2007); ARS 06, KIASMA, Museum of Contemporary Art, Helsinki; and the Whitney Biennial (2004). Works by Amy Cutler are in the collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art; The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), New York; the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; the Indianapolis Museum of Art, and other major institutions. This spring, she will participate in Darger-ism: Contemporary Artists and Henry Darger at the American Folk Art Museum in New York (April 15 through September 21, 2008).
