Anat Ebgi is pleased to announce Amie Dicke OPEN ARMS on view at 372 Broadway from September 6 through October 19. This is Dicke’s fourth solo exhibition with the gallery and debuts works from her sandpaper abrasions and cosmetics series made during the last year along with a new installation of her ‘sugar books.’ An opening reception will take place on Friday, September 6 from 6-8 pm.
An artist talk with Barry Schwabsky will be held at the gallery Saturday, September 7th at 5 pm.
Amie Dicke is an image defacer. Her interventions dissolve, blot, and distort the appearance and surface of her source material. Her intuitive and judicious destruction directs our focus to specific off-beat details, such as a gap between the legs, or a lumpy bedspread. An acute observer, she hunts, seeking a surprising, around-the-back approach. Relying on guts and intuition, she detects some underlying possibility in an image that she can alter, erase, subdue or enhance resulting in a new picture, with new stability achieved through the conflict and balance of slippery forces.
Whether caked with lipstick or liquid foundation, or brutally buffed away with sandpaper, Dicke’s process is located in responding to something emotional and raw she finds in her imagery sourced across different genres, from fashion magazines to Bauhaus catalogues to art historical painting. Muse and victim, Manet’s Olympia acts as the substrate for Dicke’s Nude (2024). The icons are inflicted with traces of Dicke’s bodily action, her sandpaper abrasions scar the surface-image—removing the famous reclining nude and servant figures. A chorus of rubbed marks echo the animated flicker of Jasper John’s cross-hatching or the sense of violation evoked by Lucio Fontana’s slashed monochromes.
The installation of ‘sugar books’ strips the objects of their legibility, covering each in sugar granules to conceal their contents. Now blank, blanketed, the pages are nullified spreads: glistening, immaculate, white, tactile, functionless. Dicke has explored sugar as a material throughout her career, beginning with How sweet is the space between my legs? (2000), where she cast the negative space between her legs in marzipan and sugar. Drawn to its transitory qualities, that it can dissolve, melt, or harden, it is also consumable and digestible. Once ingested, sugar assimilates itself into the body, entering the bloodstream; eat too much of it and you will bear the consequences. In the gallery, the splayed pages appear raw, almost excavated, elemental, reduced to an essential nature; they await transformation.
Dicke’s work is characterized by a desire to crystalize an intimacy through close looking, to break free of preconceptions. Through small repeated gestures of deconstruction, she believes something emerges, sometimes softer, sometimes sharper. Her deletions create space and distance, to observe with newfound physicality and presence.