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Fragmented, Luminous, Alive: Amanda Wall at Almine Rech

Fragmented, Luminous, Alive: Amanda Wall at Almine Rech August 6, 2025Art Events, ParisOff

Amanda Wall — “Beddy Bye” and the Poetry of the Fragmented Self

Gertrude Stein once wrote that nothing truly changes from one generation to the next except the thing seen — and that what matters is how the portrait is written, or rather, created… and felt. In her defense of repetition in art, Stein insisted that her repetitions were never exact, but altered, refined, charged with new emphasis. Through these subtle shifts, she argued, the subject could be seen — and understood — from another, deeper angle.

It is in this lineage of repetition and transformation that Amanda Wall steps forward, addressing the portrait for her generation. In an era saturated with digital images, her work reflects on the overlay and fragmentation of the self — a visual language shaped by screens, social media, and the fleeting archive of online life. And yet, Wall’s canvases are anything but cold. They thrum with sensuality: luminous figures entwined, faces pressed together, bodies dissolving into one another in a kaleidoscope of limbs, hair, stars, butterflies, and bursts of pure color.

Amanda Wall – Anon, 2025 – Oil on linen

101.6 x 127 cm, 40 x 50 in / © Amanda Wall Courtesy of the Artist and Almine Rech Photo: Matthew Kroening

Amanda Wall – Beddy Bye, 2025

Oil on linen – 152.4 x 203.2 cm, 60 x 80 in / © Amanda Wall Courtesy of the Artist and Almine Rech Photo: Matthew Kroening

In Beddy Bye, her latest series, the vantage point is intimate, almost conspiratorial: that of someone lying in bed, or of figures and objects nestled together under covers. Boys’ faces touch in a delicate tangle; clusters of girls stroke each other’s hair; cherries coil around cables and sockets, slyly mistaken at first glance for lipstick tubes. For Wall, these are not necessarily separate people, but fragments of a single, mutable identity — a self refracted and recomposed in a fractured reality.

Her characters are imagined yet strangely familiar — composites of friends, online strangers, Instagram glimpses, mirrored reflections, photographic film, and the blurred textures of memory. In our current reality, where so much is framed through the lens of a device, bodily presence becomes attenuated. Our visual frame has shifted to fit within the borders of a screen, even in recollection.

In the title work, bodies flow into one another, a figure on the right appearing to spill out of the canvas into successive, overlapping forms. The central composition is a whirlpool of hair and limbs, evoking the rapid flicker of images scrolled on a phone, or the layered textures of AI-generated pictures — both deeply anchored in our contemporary condition and yet detached from tangible space.

Portrait of Amanda Wall, 2022 Courtesy of the Artist and Almine Rech Photo: Alexis Johnson

For Wall, the bed is sanctuary and stage: a place of withdrawal, self-confrontation, metamorphosis. It is also the most complex landscape in which to stage the meeting of the physical and the digital. In her hands, it becomes a theatre for avatars and memories alike, a site where private and public lives tangle inextricably.

Beddy Bye invites us to linger in that liminal space — between waking and dreaming, body and image, intimacy and performance — and to see the self not as a single fixed portrait, but as a series of shimmering, ever-changing fragments.

Amanda Wall — “Beddy Bye”
Almine Rech, Paris
January 11 – February 15, 2025
www.alminerech.com

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Words by Shari
Editor-in-Chief, What We Adore

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