Amie Cunat, Cornflower Fanfare, 2021, flashe, gouache, and ink on canvas, 30x24 inches
Amie Cunat, Untitled (Detail of Spectrum Flower Border), 2020, flashe and gouache on canvas, 16x12 inches
Amie Cunat, Globes and Propellers, 2020, flashe, gouache, and ink on canvas, 16x12 inches
Amie Cunat, Rampion Arms, 2020, flashe, gouache, and ink on canvas, 24x30 inches
Amie Cunat, Plume in Plum with Minty Prickles, 2021, flashe, gouache, and ink on canvas, 20x16 inches
Amie Cunat, Untitled (Clouds or Call-outs), 2021, flashe and gouache on paper, 5x7 inches
Amie Cunat, Globes and Propellers , 2021, flashe, gouache and colored pencil on paper, 8x8 inches 8 x 8 inches
Amie Cunat, Cotton, Mallow, 2021, flashe, gouache, and ink on paper, 5.5x8.5 inches
Amie Cunat, Sherbert Hotel, 2019, flashe, gouache and colored pencil on paper, 8x8 inches
Checkerbloom
Amie Cunat
January 13 - February 24, 2021
Peep is pleased to announce the opening of the gallery’s second exhibition, Checkerbloom with painting by Amie Cunat. Checkerbloom, with vibrant canvas works and site-specific mural, transforms the Gallery into a “playground” of saturated color and biomorphic form.
Amie Cunat’s imagery is pulled from drawings made between 2018-2020. Although the flower-like forms flirt with recognizability, there is nothing natural or realistic about them. The imagery is more closely connected to depictions of nature in early American painting or decorative motifs utilized in Art Deco and Arts and Crafts movements. Cunat’s paintings’ are chromatically charged. She carefully considers the relationships between color in order to cultivate optic effects and a buoyant tenor. Sections of her paintings vibrate as adjacent hues bump-up against each other; while other areas “pop” as saturated shapes exist within subdued fields.
It is a joy to journey around the exhibition, stopping at every painting as though it were a destination –disembarking before continuing onto the next work. A prevalent feature to the show is Cunat’s mural, two barbed and spurred forms, that jut upward from the floor, which interrupts the linear hanging of the canvas works. As a result of its sharply painted edges against the white walls, Checkerbloom (where the exhibition gets its title) performs as a vacancy as well as a positive; akin to a cave or a clearing, a tree or a mountain. The forms contain a densely patterned interior that evokes speech bubbles, tattoos, and a shaggy lion’s mane. The painting is situated atop a painted “baseboard” that appears to frame a wine-burgundy floor –as if the entire exhibition is set to stage.
Corpus Cute and Creeping: Amie Cunat at Peep Projects, Title Magazine, Todd Stong, February 11, 2021
Amie Cunat (b. 1986, McHenry, IL) is a Japanese American artist, whose installations and paintings confront notions of familiarity through the use of comedic hues and biomorphic forms. Cunat received her MFA from Cornell University, Post-Baccalaureate in Painting and Drawing from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and her BA in Visual Arts and Art History from Fordham University. She has had solo exhibitions at Shaker Museum | Mount Lebanon, Victori +Mo, Knockdown Center, Sunroom Project Space at Wave Hill, Outside (MA), The Cooper Union, among others. Recent group exhibitions include Fur Cup at Underdonk (Brooklyn), The Unusual Suspects at DC Moore Gallery (NY), Surreality at Crush Curatorial (NY), The Unlikely Whole at ArtYard (NJ) and Softer but Louder at Geary Contemporary (NY). In 2019, she was awarded a Regional Economic Development Council Grant by NYSCA in collaboration with Shaker Museum | Mount Lebanon. Her work has been reviewed and featured by The New York Times, ARTnews, Artsy, Artnet News, Vogue Italia, ArtMaze Mag, and Two Coats of Paint. Cunat lives and works in Brooklyn, NY. She has a forthcoming solo exhibition at Dinner Gallery (New York, NY) in 2021.