Isabella Amram

Painting (MA)

About

Isabella Amram’s paintings are shaped by an engagement with uncertainty and curiosity. Having grown up across multiple countries and spoken four languages at home, she developed an early awareness of how meaning is constructed, fractured, or quietly imposed. This perspective left her sceptical of stable narratives, whether cultural, familial, or institutional, and attuned to the ways we too easily naturalise what is, in fact, contingent. In her studio, this becomes a method: each painting is a site for testing how mark-making, texture, colour, and other painterly qualities can hold conflicting impulses without forcing resolution.

Her process involves acts of layering, scraping, and return. Surfaces are built up and broken open over time. Observations gathered on daily walks, like the way light pools on water, tree branches overlap, or how cracks advance across stone, become indirect guides. These impressions are not transposed literally but metabolised into rhythms, densities, and shifts in spatial emphasis.

Amram’s paintings rarely offer clear narratives. Instead, they open spaces where marks and form might align, collide, or drift apart; where sense is suggested but never insisted upon. Colour is carefully calibrated to ground these tensions, allowing mark-making to remain open or volatile. Her surfaces oscillate between calm and agitation, and are notably textured—drawing the viewer’s attention to their physical depth in direct contrast to the smooth, frictionless images that dominate screens today.

Amram situates her work within the legacy of gestural abstraction, which foregrounded painting as an event tied to the artist’s presence and decision-making. At the same time, her practice engages critically with contemporary abstraction, asking what it means to insist on tactile, materially dense processes when visual culture is increasingly mediated by speed, algorithms, and digital flatness. Her paintings resist that flattening, demanding embodied and tactile forms of attention, and making space for complexity and the possibility that meaning might bend, overlap, or slip away entirely. In this way, her refusal of closure is both an aesthetic strategy and a subtle critique, continuously questioning what painting can still reveal.

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