Waking Life
313 Bowery, New York, NY
December 14, 2023 – January 25, 2024
313 Bowery, New York, NY
December 14, 2023 – January 25, 2024
Amanita is pleased to present Waking Life, a group show opening December 14th with a reception from 6 – 8 PM.
They say dreaming’s dead, that no one does it anymore.
It’s not dead. It’s just that it’s been forgotten.
Removed from our language.
Nobody teaches it, so no one knows it exists.
The dreamer is banished to obscurity.
I’m trying to change all that, and I hope you are too.
By dreaming every day.
Dreaming with our hands and dreaming with our minds.
Our planet is facing the greatest problems it’s ever faced.
So whatever you do, don’t be bored.
This is absolutely the most exciting time we could have possibly hoped to be alive.
And things are just starting.
— A monologue from Waking Life (2001)
Eva Beresin’s (b.1955, Budapest, Hungary) recent solo exhibitions include Aktenkundig (On Record), Amanita, New York, NY; Hidden Messages, Charim Galerie, Vienna, Austria; A Daily Exercise of Deadly Sins and Other Nonsense, La Nave Salinas, Ibiza, Spain; and Beware of the spirits that you call, M+B, Los Angeles, CA. Recent press includes reviews in The New York Times, Artforum and Art in America. Beresin’s monograph, My Mother’s Diary: Ninety-Eight Pages, was published by Verlag für moderne Kunst in 2019 and presents the artist’s paintings that were based on her mother’s journal written after her liberation from Auschwitz. Beresin has an upcoming solo exhibition at Albertina Museum in 2024. Eva Beresin lives and works in Vienna, Austria.
Francesco Cima (b. 1990, Pietrasanta, Italy) graduated in visual arts at Academy of Fine Arts in Venice in 2019. He currently lives and works in Venice. Since 2015, he has participated in numerous group exhibitions in Italy and abroad. Francesco has had solo exhibitions at Amanita in Florence and in Los Angeles. Amanita will be presenting a solo exhibition in New York in 2024.
Bill Jensen (b. 1945, Minneapolis, United States) came into prominence in the late 1970s in New York City. His work was exhibited at the New Museum, the Brooklyn Museum, at the Whitney Museum of American Art including 1981 Whitney Biennial, and the Museum of Modern Art. Recently, his work was shown at the New Bedford Whaling Museum in conjunction with its Albert Pinkham Ryder exhibition in 2021, and at MoMA PS1 in New York in 2016. Jensen earned his BFA and MFA from the University of Minnesota in 1968 and 1970, and relocated to New York City in 1971. He has lived and worked in the Williamsburg neighborhood of Brooklyn since 1976. Jensen’s work is in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art, New York; Art Institute of Chicago; the Dallas Museum of Art; the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden; the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; the Metropolitan Museum of Art; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; the Boston Museum of Fine Art; the Phillips Collection, Washington, D.C.; the Tate, London; the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, among others.
Mercedes Llanos Mercedes Llanos (b.1992, Mar del Plata, Argentina) is a painter, drawer and muralist based in New York City. She graduated with an MFA from CUNY Hunter College in 2021 and is a grantee of The Elizabeth Greenshields Foundation Grant for figurative painting. Her practice deals with the surreal aspect of dreams as they concern waking life issues, mainly focusing on power roles in domestic partnerships embedded in a South American patriarchal upbringing. In her dreams, she subconsciously navigates the repression of freedom firsthand experienced, and that of the transgenerational woman collective. Her works not only show tension between two opposing forces, but also love and care, confusing the viewer as to whether the events portrayed are pleasurable or painful, loving or hateful. Mercedes Llanos has exhibitted at Balice Hertling, Paris; Lyles and King, New York; and the Vergez Collection, Buenos Aires, Argentina. Llanos has a solo show upcoming with Amanita in 2024.
Walter Price (b. 1989, Macon, Georgia) lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. A solo exhibition of his work will open at the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, in August 2024. Recent solo exhibitions include Greene Naftali, New York (2022; 2020); Camden Art Centre, London (2021); Aspen Art Museum (2019); MoMA PS1, New York (2018); and Kölnischer Kunstverein, Cologne (2018). His work was included in the 2019 Whitney Biennial, and is in the permanent collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; The Museum of Modern Art, New York; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; High Museum of Art, Atlanta; Astrup Fearnley Museet, Oslo; Fondation Louis Vuitton, Paris; Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo, Turin; Hessel Museum of Art, Annandale-on-Hudson, New York; Aïshti Foundation, Lebanon; and Rollins Museum of Art, Orlando, among others.
Mosie Romney(b. 1994, New York, New York) lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. Working in the space between figuration and abstraction, their work uses painting as a portal through which to explore themes of self-perception and polychronic time. Recontextualizing images from a multitude of sources including family photo albums found on the internet, movie stills, literature, screen shots, dreams, and an evolving cast of characters continually recycled from previous works, Romney tells stories of empowerment and explores life as a multi-performative experience. Their work is in the permanent collections of the Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami, FL; Pond Society, Shanghai, China; the Studio Museum in Harlem, New York, NY; and the Yuz Museum, Shanghai, China, among others. Romney’s work has been included in exhibitions at White Columns, New York, NY; Nicodim, Bucharest, RO, Los Angeles, CA, and New York, NY; Greene Naftali, New York, NY; Gern en Regalia, New York, NY; Almine Rech, London, UK, and New York, NY; Rachel Uffner Gallery, New York, NY, among others.
Adrian Schachter (b.1996, New York, New York) is a contemporary visual artist whose works are developed through a sense of idealistic cynicism, moving him to analyze all hypocrisies and inconsistencies encountered. When applied to the world of images, Adrian was bombarded with an online presence since childhood, along with the rest of his generation. There was an appetite for digesting data in every form that was nothing less than voracious. Yet, the more diverse and psychologically charged the information was, the more Adrian became increasingly numbed and detached. Schachter will have a solo exhibition at Amanita in 2024. Schachter lives and works in New York.
Janaina Tschäpe (b, 1973, Munich, Germany) is a German-Brazilian artist whose multidisciplinary body of work has encompassed painting, drawing, photography, video, and sculpture. Tschäpe’s dreamlike, abstract landscapes blur the line between aquatic, plant, and human forms, referencing not only the landscapes Tschäpe draws upon for inspiration, but also her interest in myth, morphology, and the mysteries of aquatic states. Tchäpe’s work is found in important public collections including Centre Pompidou, Paris, France; Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid, Spain; Harvard Art Museum, Cambridge, Massachusetts; Museu de Arte Moderna do Rio de Janeiro, Brazil; Moderna Museet, Stockholm, Sweden; Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary, Vienna, Austria; and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, and the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., among others.
