verk + art

Amanuelabiy

By

Simone Schmid

Art curator

With his characteristic paintings, Amanuelabiy takes us to a world both unknown and familiar. On his large-scale canvases, wide landscapes unfurl and compose the backdrop for surreal encounters in the foreground. In the exhibition at VERK, we meet three new paintings, The Realization, Fear and Excitement and Jammed Inside #2.

Strict, architectonical structures pile up in front of the viewer. Distinct angles and clear, fiery colours. Is this a building? A scaffolding, a tower, a sculpture? It does not have an obvious function, just standing there, in the center of the painting.

The soft beige and light blue colours of the background contrast and highlight the shapes the painting presents. The landscape does not reveal anything about where the scene is taking place. It could be a desert, a savannah, a runway. No people are visible. Even though the artist does not give away any hint about the size of the objects, the format of the paintings suggests they are big. They occupy space.

In Fear and Excitment, we can see a large complex yellow body with straight lines and sharp angles. Slightly behind stands a counterpart with soft organic shapes and colours. The silhouettes seem to interact and to mirror each other. In The Realization, on the contrary, the bodies grow together. The organic and the industrial world meet and merge into one structure. Jammed inside #2 is another variation in which the organic body is embraced by a bright orange building structure. Is it suffocating the organic form? Or is the latter itself expanding until the building explodes?

Amanuelabiy´s work departs from the tension in the relation between different materials, forms and colours. He contrasts nature with geometric forms, metal and manufactured objects, and the organic world with the industrial. He balances on the line between figurative painting and abstraction, by depicting abstract structures in a figurative way. Thus, he plays with our perception of our material surroundings, both the natural and the man-made ones. He leads our thoughts to our relation to nature, to our build environment and to our own bodies in the world. His paintings, as well as his sculptural work, discuss the relation between different bodies, languages an attitudes – in terms of symbols and people. He captures a tension pointing out both dependency and conflict, interaction and support. Referring to classical landscape painting, architectural portrayals and hinting of Salvador Dalí´s backgrounds, Amanuelabiy interweaves different cultures and possibilities of interpretation.

The relation between stringent forms and the organic body is something that even Verk´s furniture collection has to face: To design furniture is to think about the human body, its constitution and needs. Amanuelabiy´s paintings mirror and refine a thought that is also present in the furniture we sit on when looking at them.

Simone Schmid
Art curator

Simone Schmid is an established name on the Swedish art scene. She worked as director of Wetterling Gallery for many years before becoming a freelance curator and has extensive knowledge of both Swedish and international contemporary art. She will select art for Verk’s showroom that invites dialogue and raises issues close to the company’s heart. We can look forward to four exhibitions per year with openings, personal viewings, lectures, talks and exciting interactions between design and art in various forms. Welcome to a new way of experiencing and buying art!