Amelie Mancini: 'My arms fit you like a sleeve'

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My arms fit you like a sleeve, they hold catkins of your willows, the wild bee farms
of your nerves, each muscle and fold
of your first days.
-Anne Sexton, “Unknown Girl in the Maternity Ward”

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Amelie Mancini’s paintings are emotionally charged depictions of women, often mothers, who are exploring the confines of their world. Working primarily in oil, Mancini’s work explores the joys and pangs of attachment. The paintings are visual and legible records of the actions and decisions taken throughout their making.

In her most recent series, Mancini depicts female figures engaged in familiar acts of care: holding, carrying, supporting, nurturing, cradling–their pets, their children, their homes, themselves, and ultimately the world at large. Contending with a hectic world, these women act as keystones, building space for themselves and theirs. Under Mancini’s brush, her figures turn into vessels of light and color, their bodies pulsating with an otherworldly energy.

On a formal level, Mancini constructs her paintings layer after layer, in a way that mirrors how we construct ourselves. Personal and collective experiences stack up to create a fragile equilibrium. Remnants of the making appear through the use of expressive brush work, playing with spatial and optical ambiguity, and a loose back and forth between planning and improvising.

Led by her materials, the artist uses an unrestricted color palette to create a sense of collision within the picture plane. Oscillating between figuration and abstraction, she builds her surfaces from scratch, starting with thin washes of bright color and instinctive gestural marks, later adding line and form, then layers of transparent or opaque pigments that are scumbled, blended, or glazed. Geometric motifs recalling textile or wallpaper patterns are printed directly on the surface with hand-carved linocut blocks.

With the ground under our feet constantly shifting, the care we give and receive–however imperfect, flawed, or maybe exactly right–is a powerful steadying force, and, out of the chaos of the world, allows us to reach for new states of balance and grace.

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Amelie Mancini is a painter, printmaker, and textile designer. She graduated with a Bachelor of Fine Arts Degree in Visual Arts from Sorbonne University in Paris, France. In 2022, she was the recipient of both the RWS Award and the Publicity Award from the Royal Watercolor Society in London, and in 2024, she completed the Canopy Program at the NYC Crit Club under the mentorship of Matt Phillips and Catherine Haggarty.

Mancini has exhibited widely, with recent shows including Wedding Party at Gallery 198 in Brooklyn, Fuzzy Wheel at The Canopy Studio in New York, LUSH at Hashimoto Contemporary in New York, and Summer Show at Maake Projects at State College, Pennsylvania. The artist and her work have been featured in I Like Your Work (online exhibition), Friend of the Artist (Vol. 16), New Visionary Magazine (Issue 5), and No Business Magazine. Born and raised in Lyon, France, the artist now lives and works in Brooklyn, NY.