Sperone Westwater is pleased to present On the strangest sea, a new suite of paintings by Amy Lincoln. Expanding her signature swaths of color to a larger, more immersive scale, these new paintings exude an inner light through gradation.

Though Lincoln utilizes familiar subject matter, the paintings in this series are less likely to evoke recognizable landscapes than to transport the viewer into another realm. In Overlapping waves and clouds (green, blue and pink), 2024, shades of periwinkle, moss green, lavender and pink form three-dimensional cresting waves that are layered uniformly like fish scales and juxtaposed with billowy, rounded clouds. Seeming to stretch for as far as the eye can see and beyond, one can easily imagine an infinite sea of these waves, suspended as if they are just about to crash.

Lincoln treats each section of the wood panel equally to offer the viewer a cohesive composition. As the delineation between foreground and background falls away, environmental elements are depicted with pure color. At a larger scale, these fundamental forms, such as suns or waves, become vehicles for Lincoln’s ongoing experimentation with hue and palette, changing her approach to painting. “In the past I would always start with a sky”, says Lincoln. “Then the water would be a place to echo the color and composition ideas above in a way that fit visually. Now I’m creating paintings with one color gesture that goes from the top to the bottom of the painting. Rather than dividing the composition into a main section above the horizon and a supplemental section below, in the new work I conceive the entire composition as a unit”.

Amy Lincoln lives and works in New York City. She completed her MFA at Temple University’s Tyler School of Art in 2006 and her BA at University of California, Davis in 2003. Lincoln’s work has been the subject of solo exhibitions at Sperone Westwater (2023; 2021), Taymour Grahne Projects, London (2022), Morgan Lehman Gallery, New York (2018; 2016) and Monya Rowe Gallery, Saint Augustine, FL (2016), among others. Her work has also been featured in numerous group exhibitions including Johansson Projects, Oakland, CA (2024), Columbus Museum of Art, OH (2023), The Hole, New York (2022), Sargent’s Daughters, New York (2018), and Regina Rex, New York (2017), as well as internationally at Galerie Valerie Bach, Brussels, Belgium (2020) and Taymour Grahne Projects, London (2022; 2021). Lincoln has been awarded residencies at the Wave Hill Winter Workspace program, the Inside Out Art Museum Residency in Beijing, and a Swing Space residency from the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council.