Amy Myers
The Handheld Universe, 2019
Oil on Linen
24 x 24"
Barbara Davis Gallery is pleased to present Fiercely Pretty, a solo exhibition by Amy Myers, on view from November 13th, 2026 through January 2nd, 2027.
The work has been shown with Mary Boone Gallery, NYC; Rhona Hoffman Gallery, Chicago, IL; Vielmetter Los Angeles, CA; Barbara Davis Gallery, Houston, TX; Talley Dunn Gallery, Dallas, TX; San Jose Museum of Art, CA; The Kleefeld Contemporary Art Museum, CA; Laguna Art Museum, CA ; Museum Of Fine Arts, Houston, TX; San Jose Museum of Art, CA; Weatherspoon Museum, NC; Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art, KS; Tweed Museum of Art, MN; Greenville County Museum of Art, NC; Telfair Museum, GA; Benton Museum at Pomona College, CA; Telfair Museum of Art, GA; Wayne State University Museum, Detroit, MI; amongst others.
Public collections include the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, NYC; Pérez Art Museum, FL; Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art, KS; Kleefeld Contemporary Art Museum, CA; Laguna Art Museum, CA; Museum Of Fine Arts, Houston, TX; The Bunker ArtSpace, Fl; Greenville County Museum, NC; Nora Eccles Museum, UT; Museum Of Contemporary Art Hudson Valley, NY; Wayne State University Museum, Detroit, MI; amongst others
Amy Myers’ paintings exist as both intimate and infinite. Her forms seem to emerge from a state of continuous transformation, where expansion and collapse, emergence and dissolution exist simultaneously. Neither entirely fixed nor fully abstract, they evoke something familiar yet difficult toname, drawing the viewer into a world where the boundaries between the physical and the cosmic begin to dissolve.
Myers builds translucent layers of pigment that gather and reflect light on the surface of the paintings. Luminescence becomes more than an effect. It is an active presence, shaping the atmosphere of the work and giving its forms an almost otherworldly vitality. Colors shift between darkness and radiance, creating energy that extends beyond the boundaries of the canvas. The paintings feel less like
contained images than openings into something continually unfolding.
Fiercely Pretty suggest a meeting of forces that are at once bodily and galactic. They recall organic structures, celestial phenomena, and the generative capacities of the natural world without settling into any single interpretation. There is an unmistakable femininity in their presence, though it resists fixed definition. Forms stretch, divide, repeat, and transform, occupying a space where identity remains fluid and creation is an ongoing process. The result is a striking tension between between the vastness of the universe and the vulnerability of embodied experience.
What initially appears still begins to feel active, as though the forms are generating their own atmosphere. Darkness does not simply oppose light, nor does expansion necessarily imply growth. Each contains the possibility of the other, producing a visual rhythm in which opposing states become inseparable.Drawing together references to nature, art history, feminism, and contemporary theoretical physics, Myers creates a visual language that moves between the tangible. Her paintings suggest that transformation is not an interruption of existence but one of its defining conditions.
They carry the potential to become something else, to reproduce, to dissolve, or to extend beyond what can be perceived.
Myers creates space for us to reconsider our relationship to change itself. Her paintings hold the possibility that what appears separate may be part of a larger continuum, and that intimacy and vastness are not opposing experiences.