12.26 is pleased to present Amy’s World, a new locus in the oeuvre of Amy Bessone. This exhibition is a form of world-building. Recurring figures and motifs of her last 25 years populate Amy’s World; the sense of location and narrative are expanded and defined.

In Painted Map No.1 (Amy’s World), our protagonist leaves the battleground to undertake an epic journey, intermingling with the natural world, psychological hurdles, and celestial bodies along the way. Inspiration is drawn from eclectic sources: world mythologies, cinema, tarot, gaming, literature, and art history.

Personal iconography includes archetypal figures such as the warrior, the swimmer, the water-bearer, the intellectual, the reader, bathers, goddesses, monsters, and crones. Alongside the landscape and figures, a vocabulary of architectural forms materializes.

Amy’s World is rendered in a suite of oil paintings. Bessone’s painterly craft and prowess are evident in a wide range of applications from scumbling to brushy impasto and swaths of washes, scraping, scratching, calligraphic lines, and eye-catching patterns. It’s a universe of glimmering ultramarine blues and unabashedly glowing neon pinks, punctuated with metallics and shimmering iridescences.

The following map serves as a key for the show.