Basel | ArtRegion: Basel - Oberrhein

Weiss Falk

Amanda del Valle: Magical Girl on a Bunker

12. Februar – 3. April 2022

Amanda del Valle interfaces in the exceedingly common and the supposedly taboo. The vocabulary of a worldwide cultural phenomenon, like anime, turns to a poetry of violence, eroticism and disgust as her hand lays line on paper. The works are sensual and shocking and act as mirrors for an audience reflecting on their own worries, prejudices and fantasies. For they are pictured moments, always static, and any next, or previous, step in the narratives they suggest is imagined by the viewer. If they play with taboos, they also play with the private: the theater where fetish and escape see their initial scripts written or their only performances acted. These graphite drawings recall the intense minded doodles of public school days, yet in scale reflect on the reality of women as powerful and sexual proactors. Their themes are as old as art history itself: the ill matched lovers, the double, the contrapunto nude and the origin of the world. The gentleness of their execution is in contrast to their content, the forward and the discreet rock back and forth over medium and del Valle’s recorded compositions as fantasy.