Front Room Gallery is proud to present a solo exhibition of new paintings by the artist Amy Hill entitled “Young and Innocent.”

Amy Hill’s inspiration for her most recent body of work is American Folk Portraiture, which historically served as reflections of the artists’ impressions of society, their needs, mores and family life. A common subject within American Folk Art is family, and more specifically, children, who are often depicted with a focus on their innocence, holding cuddly animals in bucolic settings.

In updating these paintings, Amy Hill has depicted urban children decorated by logos, tattoos, piercings, drugs and digital media. This allows for an examination of the phenomenon of innocence, its value, and the possibility of its survival in a fast moving world. With technical proficiency, Amy Hill explores the charm and directness of Folk Art by employing the style’s distortions in perspective and anatomy, as well as a highly personal perspective.

This new series of paintings continues Amy Hill’s examination of stylistic references from earlier eras. The eras are chosen for their stylistic kinship with their respective artists, allowing her to carry on a dialogue with the past. Hill revives the styles and makes them her own by exploring themes that can be traced to the present day. Through portraiture, a genre that runs throughout art history, Hill utilizes a variety of poses, gestures, fashion and accouterments to make social, psychological and anthropological statements. Humor emerges through the juxtaposition of modern day fashion and historical figures, as you can see in the works that are included in the exhibition.

Amy Hill is a New York based artist who received her BFA from Carnegie Mellon University and studied at New York University.  She has received numerous awards and grants including the Peter S. Reed Foundation grant, a grant from Art Matters, studio grant from the Elizabeth Foundation.  Hill received a nomination for for the Catherine Doctorow Prize for Contemporary Painting and a membership in the American Academy of Arts and Letters.  She received the Purchase Award from West Publishing Company, the Juror Award at the NYU Small Works Show and Honorable Mention from National Arts Club. Amy Hill has exhibited extensively in New York and Internationally.  Her work has been reviewed in The New York Times, Harper’s Magazine, Artnet Magazine, Artinfo.com, and Cover Magazine, as well as many other national and international publications. She currently lives and works in New York.

For inquiries, please contact Front Room Gallery: [email protected], 718-782-2556