
Amanda Wall
After a career in fashion, Los Angeles-based Amanda Wall began working as a painter in earnest in 2019. Interested in voyeurism, control, intimacy, and the body, Wall’s paintings caught First’s eye, and, a year after leaving the fashion world, she got her first solo gallery show at The Cabin LA. Since this first big break onto the scene in late 2020, Wall has had four other solo exhibitions and has been in ten group exhibitions around the world. In Puddle, there are two figures: one, nude except for a single sock laying on the ground seemingly melting into the blue puddle surrounding them, and a second standing over the first figure wearing only thigh-high black boots and turning to look at the viewer with a blank face. There is certainly an eroticism to the work, but not one that is intended to be sensual to the viewer, instead one that is unnerving to behold. The splayed limbs of the figure on the ground disappear into the floor (a floor which is blood red except for the puddle) combined with the faceless stare of the standing figure are mannequin-like and uncanny. The colors and the lack of definition between the bodies and the background give the appearance of a “Pepto Bismol pink” void (a color which Wall states she has been fascinated with since childhood). Wall is represented by Almine Rech.