Tamina Amadyar at Galerie Guido W. Baudach

Artist: Tamina Amadyar

Exhibition title: 10,000 hours

Venue: Galerie Guido W. Baudach, Berlin, Germany

Date: January 21 – March 4, 2017

Photography: Roman März, all images copyright and courtesy of the artist and Galerie Guido W. Baudach, Berlin

Galerie Guido W. Baudach is pleased to present the second solo exhibition of Berlin based artist Tamina Amadyar with the gallery. Titled 10,000 hours the show brings together a group of paintings created around the turn of the year 2016/17 representing a consistent further development of her painterly praxis.

According to writer and journalist Malcolm Gladwell’s well-known thesis, it takes 10,000 hours (or 416 days) of deliberate practice of a learned skill for a young adult to achieve mastery. The exhibition challenges this precept. Since her time studying at the Dusseldorf art academy, painting has been Tamina Amadyar’s medium of choice through which to render personal memories of spaces and places. Distinctive features of a broad spectrum of styles, ranging from abstract expressionism to contemporary abstraction, from minimalism to pop art are echoed and fused in her work. Amadyar mixes her colors herself and paints with a broad brush on unprimed canvas. Her painted spaces are coming from memory but they are universal in nature; while operating with a strong reduction of representation, they always raise the question of what lies behind, what remains hidden – but she leaves it up to the viewer to decide. This formal tension between deliberate statement and openness of interpretation combines with her characteristic brushwork, which is clearly recognizable as key part of her artistic expression and often leaves intentional gaps of paint on the canvas, to give Tamina Amadyar’s paintings a very unique distinct quality that is perceived most evidently in the latest works. While the titles of individual works might name concrete locations, these painted memories manifest themselves more than ever as pictures of internal experience. The staticness of form is thus eclipsed by the painting’s dominant free dynamism. These pictures are based on experiences that precede the painting process, while on the other hand they are providing such just by themselves.

Tamina Amadyar was born 1989 in Kabul and studied at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf. She has received the followig grants: Hooper Projetcs stipend (2015), Helmut E. Kreutzer Stiftung stipend (2013-2014), the Rölfs Partner stipend (2013) and a stipend of Heinrich-Böll Stiftung e.V. (2009-2015). In 2016 she was included in the Forbes list „30 under 30“. The artist lives and works in Berlin.