Chicago Artists Coalition is pleased to present Cloud of the Ideal, a solo exhibition with works by BOLT Resident, Amanda Joy Calobrisi.

the purplein the cloud of the ideal is torn againlooking into my sky it has vanished

-Akiko Yosano

The figures that occupy Amanda Joy Calobrisi's canvases inhabit worlds that she believes are less dangerous and more revealing than ours. In painted spaces that hover between boudoir and landscape, the women here contemplate, investigate, and celebrate their bodies. They fold, bend, lean and stretch in pursuit of new perspectives and to see themselves more clearly. In a realm where individualism and agency become the norm, self-love and self-admiration are no longer a private revolution.

Artist Bio

Amanda Joy Calobrisi is a painter living and working in Chicago, IL. Her paintings are experiential, psychological and inhabited by new feminist archetypes. The painted forms reveal themselves through heightened color, loose pattern, and uncouth texture. Organic shapes and tangled marks are executed with a loaded brush, allowing the figures to exist in a field of constant motion despite painting’s persistent stillness. From within these silent cacophonies she wants the viewer to contemplate life, our histories, womanhood, desire, tension, friendship and love.

She has exhibited her work at Learning Machine, Chicago, IL; Whitdel Arts, Detroit, MI; Fundación del Centro Cultural del México Contemporáneo, Mexico City, Mexico; Onishi Civic Center Hall, Fujioka, Japan; Naomi Fine Arts, Chicago, IL; Ugly Step Sister Gallery, Chicago IL; Unspeakable Projects, San Francisco, CA; and S & S project, Chicago. Her work has been published in New American Paintings and Cheap and Plastique Magazine.

Amanda received a Bachelor or Arts degree from the University of Massachusetts, Boston, a Post-Baccalaureate degree from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts of Boston and a Master of Fine Arts degree from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2008. She is an Assistant Professor in the Art and Design Department at Saint Xavier University where she teaches painting and drawing.