Simplified Symbols: Art by Amarie Bergman
Maquillage #2, pastel on canvas
Featured artist Amarie Bergman works in a minimalist, monochromatic style. Her artworks tend to deal with scientific and physical concepts, doing so through a way that focuses on geometric forms in black and white, reducing theories and movements to simplified symbols. Amarie currently lives and works in Canberra, Australia.
Unified Field #1, stainless steel and felted wool spheres
I really enjoy the white-on-black paintings that Amarie has created, where small white circles or squares appear like missing pixels on an expansive black canvas. The artist has also created a number of variants on this theme. A few of the works in her Quadrant Bearing exhibition take the form of a black canvas crossed with straight, white pastel lines, or a white canvas with black pixels. This hard-edged, black and white, highly scientific style reminds me a little of the work of Ryoji Ikeda.
Amarie’s practice encompasses a number of media, from painting to drawing to sculpture to photography, but her portfolio is extremely cohesive and follows a strong aesthetic. Even the artist’s graphic design works are mainly black and white, focusing on text and letterform, occasionally incorporating images that veer into the abstract.
