Black & White Gallery, Brooklyn, NY is proud to present Huldra – solo exhibition of recent works by Amy Talluto.

The title of the show alludes to a witch-like character in Swedish folklore – The Huldra, who is very beautiful and lures men into the deep woods. After a while, the men suddenly discover themselves alone, lost and disoriented as the Huldra reveals her bark-covered back, turns into a tree and blends back into the forest.

This exhibition features meticulously executed paintings and drawings, which characteristically for Talluto engage with depicting quiet and expansive natural worlds. The new works continue Talluto’s interest in using trees and forests as an inexhaustible reservoir of forms for her investigation of the interrelationship of movement and stillness, of rhythm and cacophony, of contextual claims and disorientation. The works are at once sumptuous and subtle, enigmatic and disarmingly stark. Their overflowing vitality, their unflinching zapping between colors and forms, their constant changes of tempo, their gestures and experimental arrangement make painting the theme.

An artist with a uniquely compelling visual language, Talluto keeps ducking and weaving to avoid being pinned down and to remain inscrutable overall. Thus the paintings and drawings oscillate between the mysterious and strange. The absence of any great central perspective, of feeling at home in a province of meaning reveal the movement towards the maximum possible openness in the artist’s work. Viewers will be struck both by the precision and the mastery of this young painter making use of different techniques, and her quest for new forms and stylistics, a constant need for experimentation and development.

Amy Talluto was born and mainly raised in New Orleans, LA, except for a short stint in early childhood when she lived in Cheyenne, WY and Madison, WI. As a teenager in New Orleans, she began painting and photographing landscapes, inspired by a large and wild, thistle-filled field across the street from her mother’s apartment in Chalmette, a New Orleans suburb. She earned her BFA at Washington University in St. Louis in 1995 and then moved to New York, where she has lived until her recent move to Woodstock, NY. She earned her MFA at the School of Visual Arts in New York in 2001.