Amanda Doran

Amanda Doran’s paintings seem especially concerned with taste – specifically, bad taste, and the limits of the conventionally acceptable in the painted subject. Taking as her subject images of the physically grotesque, Doran loads on the paint with appropriate abandon, wet in wet: her works are thick with gooey slathers of dirty brown and sick pink. The too-muchness of her painting is part of its vision of unselfconscious abundance: excess is the point. In Tattooed Lady the subject’s bulk transforms the space around her: space is flattened, and the complex arabesques of the decorated thighs seem to continue in the carpet and the curtains. The Semen – its lame pun of a title of a piece with the bawdy seaside subject matter – depicts a sailor sitting on a bench on the beach. His body seems like two torsos stitched together: it’s an excuse for more tattoo space, as images of skulls, anchors and stars spill out over his wobbly frame. Disintegrating into the scene, Doran’s characters make art of themselves and the world they inhabit. Everything ends up turning into flesh. Text by Ben Street