Presented by Traywick Contemporary

AMY KAUFMAN Born 1956, White Plains, NY Currently living and working Oakland, CA Amy Kaufman has shown her work extensively since receiving her fine arts degree from the California College of Arts and Crafts in 1990. Kaufman’s work is included in numerous public and private collections including the UC Berkeley Art Museum, Berkeley, CA; Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, CA; San Jose Museum of Art, CA; Fine Arts Museums, San Francisco, CA; The Fogg Art Museum, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA; Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven, CT; Crocker Art Museum, Sacramento, CA; Weatherspoon Art Gallery, Greensboro, NC; City of San Jose, CA; Mills College Art Museum, Oakland, CA; Monterey Museum of Art, Monterey, CA; and United States Embassies in Hong Kong and Singapore. The catalog that accompanied an exhibition at Traywick Contemporary features the essay, “Amy Kaufman’s Pairings,” by Elizabeth Finch, Lunder Curator of American Art at Colby College Museum of Art. The following excerpt captures the nuances of Kaufman’s work: “For Willem de Kooning, content was “a glimpse of something.” Kaufman, by contrast, practices a meditative rather than a momentary deployment of looking and sensing, a connoisseurship of visual and haptic experience. Her looking is absorptive; it gathers patterns, visual rhythms, textures, and colors. Art history is a source (Kaufman’s recent painting, Monte Carlo, is inspired by a section of Max Beckman’s Dream of Monte Carlo), but her selective eye also takes in bits of nature and any object, common or rare, that captures and holds her attention. By repeating striped, curved, and knotted motifs, she generates singularities, differences of touch, color, and composition that materialize her perceptions. Kaufman works with a variety of supports — stretched linen, various papers, and the occasional cigar box. Her colors are similarly diverse and derive from a wide range of media including pastel, oil paint, conté crayon, charcoal, and silverpoint.”