SHFAP presents an exhibition of two contemporary female abstract painters — Amanda Church and Jenny Hankwitz — who share a sleek, streamlined approach to curvilinear geometry. Their work is in the tradition of Leger, Lichtenstein, Adami, and Ramberg. 

Jenny Hankwitz is a New York City-based painter who also works upstate.  She received her BFA from the University of California, Santa Barbara, in 1983. She has shown at Art Resouces Transfer, The Roswell Museum of Art, and Cheryl Pelavin. She states, “It was in 1994 that I began making ‘computer drawings.’ I jumped on it and never looked back. I scanned all my paintings, along with shapes, brush marks, and splatters that I had made with ink. The computer became my notebook, where I was drawing, coloring, twisting, printing, and re-working. I would tape them up on my wall at night to give them a critique, so I could change them the next day.” Thomas Micchelli in Hyperallergic has written that ”Hankwitz’s abstraction… enters the free-floating realm of metaphor.” And Ken Johnson in The NY Times described Hankwitz’s abstractions as producing “a sudsy mix of formalist flux and Pop buoyancy.”

Artist and writer Riad Miah wrote this in Painters on Painting about Amanda Church’s work: “What makes Amanda Church’s paintings so seductive? Is it the constant flipping between abstraction and figuration? Is it the playfulness, the command of color, the underlying eroticism, or their relationship to Pop that makes them so alluring? Or maybe it’s that her work looks like it could be the lovechild of John Wesley and Ralston Crawford. Whatever the reason, Church’s paintings are immediately approachable and upon closer analysis conjure elements of Surrealism, Abstraction and even Minimalism.”

Amanda Church received a BA in Painting and Drawing at Bennington College, before attending the NY Studio School.  She has had solo shows at High Noon Gallery in NYC, Espacio 20/20 in San Juan, Tom Jancar in Los Angeles, and Galerie du Tableau in Marseille, France. She is the recipient of a 2015 Guggenheim Fellowship as well as NYFA and Pollock Krasner grants in 2017.

The two artists situate themselves in an open and allusive landscape of forms — a vibrant, lively twist on the tradition of hard-edge painting in which meaning snakes its way through configurations that are always suggestive but never spelled out.

Please contact the gallery for further information and images. 

Info@shfap.com   917-861-7312

Thank you!