Amanda Baldwin: Nova

In Nova, Amanda Baldwin turns to monoprinting for the first time, using repetition as a structure for transformation. Created in collaboration with master printmaker Brad Ewing, the works extend Baldwin’s ongoing investigations of landscape, color, pattern, and pictorial space into a new medium.

Across the series, a landscape returns again and again. Stylized trees and vegetation rise from the foreground; mountain-like forms overlap along a distant horizon; above them, an enormous concentric form dominates the sky. At once sun, moon, eye, aperture, and celestial body, it draws the composition inward even as its rings seem to radiate outward. The structure remains recognizable from one work to the next, but its atmosphere shifts dramatically through color. Deep blues become acidic greens; lavender gives way to magenta; cool nocturnal spaces reappear in incandescent orange and red.

The title Nova derives from the Latin word for “new.” Historically, a nova appeared to observers as the sudden arrival of a new star, though the phenomenon is now understood as the dramatic brightening of an existing stellar system. The distinction feels particularly resonant here. Baldwin does not begin anew with every image. Instead, she returns repeatedly to a shared composition, subjecting it to successive transformations. Each work emerges from the same underlying structure while appearing to flare into an entirely different chromatic and psychological state.

That tension between repetition and singularity is embedded in the works’ construction. Baldwin and Ewing began with layers of silkscreen on Coventry Rag paper, using seven color flats and split-fountain printing to establish the underlying chromatic structure. Baldwin then hand-painted films that were used to generate additional screenprinted layers, translating the gestures of her paintings into a printmaking process while preserving the irregularity of her hand. She subsequently painted directly into the printed sheets with gloss silkscreen ink before a final screenprinted layer was added. Back in her studio, Baldwin continued to work extensively into each image with acrylic and oil.

The resulting works occupy a fluid territory between painting and printmaking. Print traditionally carries the possibility of repetition, while painting is associated with the singular object. Baldwin uses the reproducible structure of the screenprinted image as a framework for variation rather than sameness. The repeated composition acts as an armature, making shifts in color, opacity, texture, and gesture newly visible from one work to the next. The same landscape can appear submerged, nocturnal, blooming, irradiated, or aflame.

This movement between recognition and abstraction has developed steadily throughout Baldwin’s practice. Earlier paintings were populated by fruits, plants, vessels, and patterned surfaces, with objects arranged to establish depth across the picture plane. Over time, those structural concerns migrated into increasingly immersive landscapes. Natural motifs became more distilled, color assumed a greater compositional role, and repeated textures began to organize space as much as perspective itself. In recent paintings, spirals and concentric circles have become particularly important, simultaneously suggesting recession and expansion.

In Nova, that tendency reaches an almost cosmic register. The central form appears to open into the image while projecting itself toward the viewer. Space alternately deepens and collapses. The landscape becomes less a view onto a stable external world than a constructed environment governed by rhythm, color, and transformation.

Baldwin received her MFA in Painting and Printmaking from Virginia Commonwealth University in 2012. Main Projects is especially pleased to present this new body of work in Richmond, returning Baldwin’s practice to the city where an important period of its development took place.

Amanda Baldwin (b. 1984, Seattle, Washington) lives and works in Queens, New York. Her solo exhibitions include Sun Rose, Jason Haam, Seoul; Wild Weeds, Public Gallery, London; Indigo Skyline, Galerie Marguo, Paris; Raindrops are Spheres, Hesse Flatow, New York; Last Weekend’s Lemon, Thierry Goldberg Gallery, New York; and To Each Their Own, Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Richmond. Her work is held in collections including the Seoul Museum of Art, Long Museum, Palm Springs Art Museum, Sixi Museum, X Museum, Start Museum, Asymmetry Art Foundation, and the University of Washington.