Jennifer Amadeo-Holl

Artist’s Statement

I describe my paintings as abstracted narratives. They explore the complementarity of abstraction and representation, and the relationship between individuals, the animate and inanimate. The images are often rich in detail and associational imagery - a plethora of ‘facts’ are provided, yet the whole is still insufficiently factual to be caged in a static idea.

Geometric forms combine with organic, curious, and accidental shapes to make inferences to recognizable forms, while rendered objects fuse, morph or sit juxtaposed with abstract shapes. Compositional densities can range from a stimulating emptiness to a consonant surfeit, as befits each painting's needs. My palette has evolved over time, with unusual, intense, or dissonant colors deployed as often as not to achieve balance through imbalance. I rarely use color symbolically but I do use it as a constructive medium.

I am drawn by the mystery of why the inanimate, including painting itself, should so often and so urgently feel sensate, though in a manner unique to itself. I see painting as a physical and philosophical practice, one which examines the nature of reality, the relationship between mind and matter, and the interplay of fact and value. I am not painting towards something more than or truer than the real. I find the world simultaneously mundane and fantastical, and therefore see the incorporation or creation of “imaginary” imagery as native to reality, that is, the ordinary is the imaginary. My hope is to make formidable but tender, paradoxically harmonic paintings, that may be inexplicable and yet speak.

Resides

Boston MA

TRAINING

Harvard-Radcliffe College - BA Magna - Visual & Environmental Studies / East Asian Studies

Swedish Royal Academy of Art

School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

AWARDS

NEA / NEFA - Vermont Studio Center - Artist’s Residency Award

NEA / NEFA / Benton Foundation - Arts On-Line Award

Swedish Institute Fellowship for Arts, Letters & Research - Two Year Artist's Residency

Trustman Travelling Fellowship for the Study of Art - One Year in Europe

McCord Prize for Outstanding Artistic Achievement, Harvard University

FEATURED EXHIBITS

2006 Aya Baya Bazaar, Jennifer Amadeo-Holl, Judi Rotenberg Gallery, Boston

2005 Silas-Kenyon Gallery, The Schoolhouse Galleries, Provincetown

2005 A to Z, Judi Rotenberg Gallery, Boston

2003 Icons, Judi Rotenberg Gallery, Boston

2004 Project Wall - The Silas-Kenyon Gallery, The Schoolhouse Galleries, Provincetown

2002 Silas-Kenyon Gallery, The Schoolhouse Galleries, Provincetown

1999 Silas-Kenyon Gallery, The Schoolhouse Galleries, Provincetown

1998 Silas-Kenyon Gallery, The Schoolhouse Galleries, Provincetown

1994 Colgados del Ocaso - Cultural Institute of Monte Carmelo, Santiago, Chile

SELECTED GROUP EXHIBITS

2006 Evoke Gallery, St. Paul - Twin Cities, Minnesota

2005 Boston Convention & Exhibition Center, Summer Street Solstice

2005 7th Annual Small Works Show: Attleboro Museum. Jurors: Paul Lam, Locco Ritorro Gallery; Kristen Dodge, Judi Rotenberg Gallery

2002 Tainted Love - Studio SOTO, Boston

2001 Mass College of Art Benefit: Jurors: Cheryl Brutvan, MFA; Barbara Krakow, Krakow Gallery

2000 DeCordova Museum Downtown - Federal Reserve Gallery

2000 AIDS Auction - BCA - Jurors: Bob Kugel, ART-CETERA; Bernard Toale, Bernard Toale Gallery

2000 Say It With Flowers - FPAC Gallery, Boston

1996 The Anxiety of Influence: How Artists Relate to their Predecessors - CAA Juror, Jock Reynolds - Director, The Addison Gallery of American Art

1996 Animal, Vegetable, Mineral - The Art Gallery, University of New Hampshire

1995 Zero One Gallery, Los Angeles, CA

1994 The Studio Show - Boston Center for the Arts Cyclorama

1994 Lunatics & Lovers - Bromfield Gallery, Boston

1994 Sex Blind: Genderal Admissions - Gallery 28, Boston - Curator, Addison Parkes

1993 Tiempo de Arte - Cultural Institute of Las Condes, Santiago, Chile

BIBLIOGRAPHY: ARTICLES, REVIEWS and ESSAYS

Cate McQuaid, “On Outer Cape, Funky Portraits Tempt and Tease,” Boston Globe, 8/5/2005

Christopher Millis, “The Hour of Lead,” Phoenix, 8/12/05, Review of Rotenberg Director’s Pick.

Channel 56, Best Bets, Judi Rotenberg Gallery Exhibits, Thursday October 2, 2003.

Cate McQuaid, “Say it with Flowers”, Boston Globe Living/Arts E1+E8, Thursday 1/6/2000.

Mary Sherman, “Fort Point Arts Show Says Everything with Flowers”, Boston Herald

Living/Arts 60 Sunday 12/26/1999.

Walter Wadas, “Petal Pushers: Artists Seem United - and Divided - in their

Post-Modern Disparagements of Beauty, Writ Large”, Bay Windows 18:4, Arts 10, 1/13/2000.

Charles Giuliano, catalog essay for Colgados del Ocaso, January 1994.

Gaspar Galaz C., catalog essay for Colgados del Ocaso, January 1994.

Ricardo Bindes, "Pinturas de J. Amadeo-Holl", La Tercera, 1/23/1994.

Elisa Pérez V., "Artista De la Vida", El Mercurio, 1/28/1994.

Mónica Villarroel, "El arte no viene de otro mundo", La Nación, 1/17/1994.

"Chile Visto por Ojos Norteamericanos", Las Ultimas Noticias, 1/14/1994.

"Las Experiencias Pictóricas de una Norteamericana", La Epoca, 1/5/1994.

Miles Unger, Review of Equus Exhibit, Art New England 1992.