AMY BESSONE
Name: Amy Bessone
Age: 51
Birthplace: New York, USA
Home: Los Angeles, California and Western Massachusetts, USA
Discipline: Free-range, Painting & Sculpture
Sunday Reading, 2019, oil on canvas, courtesy of Alison Jacques Gallery
What is your background?
When I was a kid in the 70s and 80s, it was the time of NYC suburban culture and its significant input. My family gave me access to a lot of culture at the time, and I spent my teenage years looking at art in museums and galleries. I remember that time when Jean-Michel Basquiat was on the cover of NYT Magazine, the revolution of MTV, and the spread of New Wave music. I started taking drawing, painting and photography classes at The School of Visual Arts in NY, before moving to Paris in 1989. There I studied at the faculty in Fine Arts Department at Parsons Paris and the Art History Department at the American University until 1993. In 1995, Amsterdam felt like being thrown offthe high diving board into the contemporary art pool so I decided to move there and met a lot of mentors and painters who were breaking out at the time. I spent my weekends lost in Belgium at the end of the 90s, before finally moving to LA. I’m one of the lucky ones to still be developing.
What are the main topics you deal with in your work?
The female figure usually takes center stage in my work, arriving with all her art, historical and societal baggage in tow.
How do you define your artistic search and practice?
Both experiential.
Which techniques do you use to create?
I use observation, meditation, action, and a wide-ranging cannibalism of visual culture, both contemporary and historical.
How do you consider your work in relation to current societal issues?
I am not interested in making didactic art at all. Making work whose simple purpose is to demonstrate one’s politically bona !de seems very boring to me. Political purity and moralizing tend to flatten things out, and I see great art as almost an antidote to that. It is a space of nuance, complexity, depth, uncertainty, fantasy, freedom, weirdness, spirituality, irreverence, transgression, humor and time travel, including our own commonalities.
What kind of beauty does your work focus on?
Connection is the kind of beauty I am interested in, whether it be sensual, psychological, academic or theoretical. I hope people can be drawn to objects through colors or energetic presence. The most beautiful thing would be to produce an object someone could have an enduring and evolving relationship with over a long period of time.
What does being an artist mean in your opinion today?
I can only speak for myself, but art is essential on an existential level. This is my path.
What is the message you want to deliver with your work?
Abiding joy. I acknowledge that as we move through life we may experience great sadness, loss, grief or turmoil and still !nd joy and grace on a daily basis.