Biography of Amy Cutler
Amy Cutler is renowned for her folkloric drawings, prints and paintings. A highly skilled artist, she creates intricately drawn scenarios informed by fairytales, popular culture, media, history and most importantly, contemporary society. Cutler’s work deals mainly with womanhood, which she explores from her own personal experience as well as from universal reference points, old and new.
Groups of women are indeed often depicted in Amy Cutler’s works, at times in the throws of what look like stereotypically female activities like weaving or harvesting, but in fact nearly always performing something utterly meaningless and nonsensical. What becomes apparent when looking at one of Cutler’s works is that these communities of women seem to be fulfilling the roles that their society expects of them, despite these roles being misguided. Cutler reflects on the ways in which women across the globe, in all kinds of communities, are misperceived and often misused. Through her fictitious scenarios she highlights how detrimental this is, imploring her viewers to reconsider the way women are treated and viewed.
Amy Cutler relies on traditional techniques and mediums, such as intaglio, chine-collé, lithography, gouache works, to create the timeless quality that is signature to her oeuvre. Her pieces are always a unique hybrid of realism and a fantastical man-less dystopia.
Amy Cutler features in several significant public and private collections internationally, amongst them the Deutsche Bank collection, The Philadelphia Museum of Art, the MoMA, the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Whitney in NYC, the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, the Museo Nacional Centro de Reina Sofia in Madrid and the Hammer Museum in LA. She has been exhibiting widely for the past two decades, with notable recent solo exhibitions at the Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art in Missouri, the Museo Nacional de Reina Sofia and the Indianapolis Museum of Art.
