Location: Berkeley, CA
Medium: Sculpture, bas relief, painting, works on paper, mixed media
Website: amynathan.com
Amy Nathan is an artist based in Berkeley, California. She received her MFA from Mills College in 2018 and was a 2018–2019 Graduate Fellow at the Headlands Center for the Arts. She is co-director of Royal NoneSuch Gallery in Oakland and is represented by CULT Aimee Friberg Exhibitions in San Francisco. Her work has appeared in the San Francisco Chronicle, New American Paintings, and Sculpture Magazine. She has lectured and taught at Stanford University, UC Berkeley, Berkeley City College, California College of the Arts, Sonoma State University, and Mills College at Northeastern University. Her work has been exhibited at Art Toronto, the Seattle Art Fair, Art Market San Francisco, the Headlands Center for the Arts, and with the International Sculpture Center at Pyramid Hill Sculpture Park and Museum.
Nathan’s work begins with the act of applying pressure to images and language — cracking them open, making them tactile, distending them into an expanded space. She is drawn to depictions of power that are diffuse and paradoxical: Athena, J-Lo, Britney Spears, Medusa. Paparazzi photos and celebrity selfies are remade as Etruscan-style bas reliefs; figurative imagery combines with geometric pattern; sculpture incorporates materials like hydrocal, pigmented resin, hammered metal, and pulled threads that conflate the domestic and the armored, the ornamental and the structural. She works across the push-and-pull between interior voice and external appearance, and the tension between representation and abstraction — ranging in scale from jewelry to architecture.
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