Opening: November 21, from 6 - 8 pm
Exhibition dates: November 22 - January 6, 2026
Opening times: Mon-Sat 11 am - 7 pm
Address: Taymour Grahne Projects, Warehouse 31A, Alserkal Avenue, Street 8, Al Quoz 1, Dubai
Taymour Grahne Projects is pleased to present 'Monochromes’, a solo show by NY based artist Amy Lincoln, opening at Taymour Grahne Projects in Dubai on November 21, from 6 - 8 pm.
In ‘Monochromes’, we encounter a selection of Lincoln’s paintings executed between December 2024 to mid 2025, as well as several studies dating back to 2019. The latter demonstrate Lincoln’s evolution from the dense, representational style she had previously favoured, towards the more minimalist approach that dominates the former.
Amy Lincoln’s work evokes the ineffable feel of being in a lake or on a beach, on a prairie, or within the bosky cool deep within a forest. There is a calm and rightness that she finds and gives us, from the stillness of landscape. In the patterns and spatial arrangements, Lincoln's works exude a sense of peace.
‘Her paintings completely absorb you when you look at them,’ Grahne says. ‘You’re taken by their vibrancy and powerful energy. To me, her paintings almost exist as spaces from another realm. Is this Earth? Is this the past? The future?”
Titling the exhibition ‘Monochromes’ alludes to the disciplined use of colour that has come to distinguish Lincoln’s paintings. Works such as Sun with Trees (Yellow Monochrome) 2025 and Trees with Dark Sun (Magenta, Green & Blue) 2024 typically use observed representations of natural elements, represented as graphical objects, arrayed in rhythmic sequences, front to back, light to dark, side to side; each ingeniously defined by shifting gradients of colour.
This body of work represents an era of reinvigoration and creative rebirth for the artist, following a period of working through a creative block towards the end of the last decade. Then, despite an acclaimed practise, Lincoln had found herself thinking a lot about colour and forms in her busy botanical compositions. Why did her skies have to be so blue? Why not purple – or red – or yellow? How could a rainbow’s essence be conveyed in monochromes of red and green instead of the more conventional seven colours? Could magenta feel like blue when contrasted with red? Could trees work in hues of yellow? Didn’t they look more dramatic that way?
Some of these experiments began yielding intriguing results and encouraged, Lincoln continued her search towards a new approach towards colour and form. She re-examined the way she approached the components of her canvases, in search of calmer rhythms without sacrificing the power of the natural forms that so beguiled her. She loved it all - the sun, the stars, the moon, rainbows, plants, trees, landscapes, the sea. Wait - the sea, the sea!
In April 2019, Lincoln had accepted a commission from avant-garde dance group Norte Maar. The brief was to create a stop-motion animation to be projected behind a dancer during her performance at Norte Maar’s Counterpointe7 event. It was a perfect match of music, motion and movement. Lincoln’s work washed across the proscenium, while the dancer moved within and around her visuals. Wanting to allow space for the dancer’s body to sketch a melody over complementary visual rhythms, colours and structure, Lincoln chose a seascape, blocky, charming and enveloping, with its repetitive graphic curlicues and pointed waves. This worked so well, Lincoln realised she had landed on a new way of working: sublimating natural forms into blocky, faux-naif graphic symbols. These charming forms not only created opportunities to experiment with juxtaposing colours, but they also re-energised her canvases with their repetitive energy and shifting perspectives.
Lincoln went in hard, immediately beginning a seascape inspired by the Norte Maar project, a ‘transitional’ piece that embodied her new ideas. She went on to plunge repeatedly into the sea, such was her delight in this new creative approach. ‘Monochromes’ include several studies from this period, each visibly imbued with creative excitement. The rainbows, clouds, waves and rain fall on the graphic waves, beneath skies in shades of greens, yellows, purples and reds. Seascapes offered Lincoln a perfect subject matter to experiment with – air, water, vapour and light possess no intrinsic colour. See Seascape with Clouds and Rain (Pink and Green) for a delicious example of her control in shifting tones between the titular colours to generate an utterly absorbing scene, delicate, immersive. Successively darker planes of waves create depth, reaching back to a horizon, while glistening wavelets lapping at the front. You can almost smell the salt water, almost feel the cold misty spray on your face.
Since the end of 2019, Lincoln had further focused her process by restraining herself to working with just three colours, plus white. By reducing the palette to three pigments, she would see each as a primary colour. For example, in Red Rainbow with Clouds, Pyrrole Red operates as red, Pyrrole Orange functions as yellow, and Magenta becomes blue. Seasoning these primary pigments with white paint, Lincoln found renewed inspiration and unexpected outcomes.
After some years exploring the potential of seascapes, she expanded her lexicon of symbols to landscapes - trees, leaves and grass in beguiling perspectives created purely by infinitesimal adjustments to the dominant colour’s values, to generate light, perspective and depth.
Monochromes’ landscapes, seascapes and rainbows retain the mystery and wonder that has always been at the heart of Lincoln’s work but here, display astonishing subtlety and variation as you survey them in a series. Graduated, subtle tonal shifts invested simplified forms such as repeated waves, the pull between sun, land and sea, with dramatic energy. The strategy has paid off, handsomely, throughout the works in the show.
Photo credit for artwork images: Andrew Schwartz