Nine Paintings (2009 - 2022)

Amanita presents Nine Paintings (2009-2022), Andrew Piedilato’s (b. 1974) first solo exhibition with the gallery and his first show in almost a decade. The exhibition serves as a collective survey of paintings made over the last fifteen years.

In Piedilato’s paintings, elements of construction: pillars, harnesses, ropes and columns are imbued with terrestrial force. Carcasses of windswept material, oscillate and rupture, just as elemental forces – hurricanes and tsunamis – wreck and ravage , leaving behind apocalyptic detritus. Compositions take zoomorphic shape with serpentine movement; our inventions appear to rebel against their original nature, as if to mock our idle accomplishments. Piedilato’s paintings, conditioned by humankind's wayward plans to dethrone nature as the earth’s dominating occupant, evoke the Wordsworthian plight between nature and its imposed opposite.

The world is too much with us; late and soon,
Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers;
Little we see in Nature that is ours;
We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon!
This Sea that bares her bosom to the moon;
The winds that will be howling at all hours,
And are up-gathered now like sleeping flowers,
For this, for everything, we are out of tune;
It moves us not.—Great God! I'd rather be
A pagan suckled in a creed outworn;
So might I, standing on this pleasant lea,
Have glimpses that would make me less forlorn;
Have sight of Proteus rising from the sea;
Or hear old Triton blow his wreathèd horn.

-William Wordsworth, “The World is Too Much With Us,” Poems, in Two Volumes, 1807

Andrew Piedilato was born in Athens, GA and now lives and works in Brooklyn, NY. He is the recipient of the 2015 Rosenthal Family Foundation Award in Painting. He also received the George Segal Grant in 2005, and was nominated for the Lambent Fellowship in 2006. Andrew received his MFA in Painting from Pratt Institute, NY and has a BFA in Painting from the University of Georgia, GA. Andrew has been in solo and group shows at The American Academy of Arts and Letters, New York; Patrick Painter, Los Angeles; HVCCA, English Kills, and Black & White Gallery, New York. A selection of public collections include Berkeley Art Museum, Fredrick R. Weisman Museum of Art, Flint Institute of Arts, and the Pacific Film Archive