Part of Alserkal Art Week: UPROOTED
In Monochromes, we encounter a selection of Lincoln’s paintings executed between December 2024 to mid 2025. The works demonstrate Lincoln’s evolution from the dense, representational style she had previously favoured, towards the more minimalist approach that dominates the former.
Amy Lincoln’s work evokes the ineffable feel of being in a lake or on a beach, on a prairie, or within the bosky cool deep within a forest. There is a calm and rightness that she finds and gives us, from the stillness of landscape. In the patterns and spatial arrangements, Lincoln's works exude a sense of peace.
“Her paintings completely absorb you when you look at them,” Grahne says. “You’re taken by their vibrancy and powerful energy. To me, her paintings almost exist as spaces from another realm. Is this Earth? Is this the past? The future?”
Titling the exhibition ‘Monochromes’ alludes to the disciplined use of colour that has come to distinguish Lincoln’s paintings. Works such as Sun with Trees (Yellow Monochrome) and Trees with Dark Sun (Magenta, Green & Blue) typically use observed representations of natural elements, represented as graphical objects, arrayed in rhythmic sequences, front to back, light to dark, side to side; each ingeniously defined by shifting gradients of colour.
This body of work represents an era of reinvigoration and creative rebirth for the artist, following a period of working through a creative block towards the end of the last decade. Then, despite an acclaimed practice, Lincoln had found herself thinking a lot about colour and forms in her busy botanical compositions. Why did her skies have to be so blue? Why not purple – or red – or yellow? How could a rainbow’s essence be conveyed in monochromes of red and green instead of the more conventional seven colours? Could magenta feel like blue when contrasted with red? Could trees work in hues of yellow? Didn’t they look more dramatic that way?
Some of these experiments began yielding intriguing results and encouraged, Lincoln continued her search towards a new approach towards colour and form. She re-examined the way she approached the components of her canvases, in search of calmer rhythms without sacrificing the power of the natural forms that so beguiled her. She loved it all—the sun, the stars, the moon, rainbows, plants, trees, landscapes, the sea. Wait—the sea, the sea!