Amanda Church

[1][2][3] Her works straddle representational and formalist art traditions, suggesting recognizable body parts, objects, and perspectival elements in an otherwise abstract field.

"[26][25][10] A frequent subject of commentary is the emotional tension suggested by Church's use of light-hearted elements, such as a cartoon-like aesthetic, to depict potentially unsettling scenes of distorted and disembodied limbs.

Critic John Yau described Church's paintings as "disarming and disturbing," while Adam Lehrer of Forbes Magazine called them "fun but simultaneously uncomfortable.

[25][27][28][24] Church has described her artwork as "anthropomorphized pop extractions,"[24] and in her first decade of work, these often appeared as self-contained protozoan subjects set at some distance against flat, monochrome backdrops—for example in The High Life (1999), which she showed in an early solo exhibition at Clifford Smith Gallery in Boston.

[12][24][26][27] Cate McQuaid of The Boston Globe described Church's works in that show as "funky, biomorphic geometries [that] squirm against flat, bright backgrounds, hinting at humanity.

"[12] Some early subjects evoked creamy desserts for reviewers,[7][24] including one that New York Times art critic Ken Johnson likened to abstracted ice cream.

For example, in the Copenhagen show, "Minimal Baroque" (2014), Church exhibited Man with a Big Heart (2010), which places a "mini-Mondrian grid" in a field of curvilinear, organic shapes, some resembling genitalia.

With titles such as "Voyeurs" and "Bedheads," many of the paintings suggest erotic scenarios with what art writer Adam Simon called a "winking" subtlety.