Avenues

Join us to launch our 2024 programme. We are delighted to present Glasgow based artist Amanda Seibæk’s first large-scale solo exhibition.

Danish-born Amanda Seibæk has continued to develop her screen printing and painting practice, since graduating from the Glasgow School of Art in 2022. This new body of work continues her interests in literature and scientific explanations of natural phenomena. Seibæk is inspired by the traditions of autotheory, the combinations of narrative, autobiography, memoir and critical theory. Seibæk recounts writers like Maggie Nelson, who connect multiple fields of knowledge, never deeming any irrelevant for her explorations. Across multiple planes and layers of paint on transparent voile, Seibæk explores broader questions of philosophy, astrology, science and culture within personal experiences, as a way to navigate our way through life.

Seibæk uses these ideas as a metaphorical tools to express turmoil in contemporary life though a more poetic lense. This can be used as a force to ask questions, to visualise thoughts and emotions, by example in her largest painting; ‘Cerebrum’ the human form blurs and blends into a fictitious narrative.

When working with screen print and paint Seibæk is developing a language that does not divide or isolate printmaking as a separate component of her practice. Instead Seibæk’s images exist in three complimentary mediums; digital, print, and paint. The screen’s reflectiveness inspires the choice of surface and the multiple layers of printing. The transfer of print onto canvas or as seen predominantly on voile in Avenues, orchestrates the composition on the final painting which she completes with her brush. Through this material process, Seibæk analyses the interlinking relationship between emotion and motion to create images that views can connect with.

“I see colours in layers and with colours I start to shape my figures.”

Amanda Seibæk

A simple path, road or ‘journey’ is often cited to describe our way through life. These imaginative routes are also abstract ideas that bind us together while remaining deeply personal. This is a ‘site’ used by artists, writers and philosophers across the centuries. A space to explore, to reflect, to plan the next step.

Amanda Seibæk’s large oil paintings on voile propose an imaginary walk via the sentimental cartography of the Carte de Tendre. In this ancient French map the stations of love on an imaginary route are bisected by the ‘Inclination’ (a winding river), that joins two smaller rivers ‘Respect’ and ‘Gratitude’ before plunging into ‘the Dangerous Sea’.‘The light and shade between these visions and propositions create a landscape of commonalities, we might all have stood by the ‘Lake of Indifference’ or felt intense ‘Pride’ before a fall. In this presentation, Seibæk draws upon the crossroads between actions, feelings, a sense of purpose, the pull of nature, and ultimately the pathways we choose.

Seibæk’s paintings are painted on transparent voile. The stretcher is visible as a grid, structure or window open to the thin air like veil and fleeting brushstrokes. It acts as a reassuring platform to explore thoughts and ideas. The poetics of the paint and the tension of the surface become a meeting point between the orderliness of an imaginary map and the messiness of quotidian life.

Seibæk employs layers of transparency, not to conceal, but as an invitation to step forward and into the landscape, real or imagined to look further than the canvas or the screen.

Patricia Fleming

Amanda Seibæk: Avenues

1 - 30 March 2024