Amy Wright

Amy Wright is an Australian artist based on the Bellarine Peninsula in Victoria, where she paints from her garden studio. Her path does not follow the expected trajectory of a painter: after graduating from the Victoria College of Arts and then RMIT (textile design), she worked first as a designer in Melbourne and then in Detroit, before teaching in Melbourne. She then founded Wunderplant, a floral design studio that gradually gave her the time to return to painting. The solo exhibition Narrative, in 2017, marked her move to a full-time studio practice, which she has pursued without interruption ever since.

This trajectory (textile, industry, teaching, floral art) is not a biographical anecdote: it explains how Wright builds a painting. Each work starts from a photograph taken at very close range, whether of a texture, a nuance, or an angle that no one else would have framed, but also of objects gathered on the very spot: seed pods, dried seaweed, fragments of colored plastic washed up in the vegetation. From memory and in superimposed layers (acrylic, oil, charcoal, pastel, conté crayon, spray paint, collage), she builds landscapes with no fixed horizon, where the planes stack up instead of receding into depth, and where the vegetation spills over until it closes the scene in on itself. The starting motif often disappears entirely beneath the subsequent layers, to the point that the finished canvas, such as Mind Map Landscape or Constructing Landscape, no longer tells how it began.

"I see landscapes as a collage, a breakdown into elements: textures, pattern, color," says Wright, who claims a constant interest in "the landscapes that most people would leave aside."

This absence of hierarchy between motif and ground, this surface treated everywhere with the same intensity, has a precise name in the history of painting: the all-over, a term that Clement Greenberg first applied not to Jackson Pollock but to Janet Sobel, a self-taught painter whom Pollock had seen before formalizing his own dripping. Greenberg traces this genealogy back even further: in Monet's late Water Lilies, painted from his own garden at Giverny and displayed at the Orangerie with no horizon or shoreline, he sees the Western birth of a decentered painting that he regards as the direct seedbed of the New York School. Wright inherits it from the other end of the gesture: no longer the pond transposed into the museum, but the still-living garden, painted from the inside.

Eight years after Narrative, this practice has found its international rhythm: solo exhibitions at Brunswick Street Gallery (Leave No Shadow, 2024; Into The Fold, 2025), and a presence at the London Art Fair with Circle Contemporary (2023–2025) and at Tappan, in New York and Los Angeles (2024–2025).

This is how Wright paints places where vegetation is taking back what humans had traced or abandoned, down to the colored plastic she picks up like any other debris from the undergrowth. The canvas does the same to the gaze: no center, no hierarchical taking of control, only a surface that, like the garden it paints, has ceased to obey an orderly plan.