ARTIST OVERVIEW

Amy Weiskopf (1957–) paints meticulously crafted still lifes bristling with 21st-century tension and energy. Weiskopf skillfully weaves subtle traces of irony, drama, eroticism and art historical reference through her multilayered paintings of fruits and vegetables. These tense arrangements of evocative objects are dramatically staged and lit to create surreal optical effects, visual puns, and elegiac meditations on the nature of existence.
 
Weiskopf draws inspiration from the tradition of Italian and Spanish Vanitas painting—17th-century still lifes that emphasized the transience of life and the imminence of death. Works by the Spanish Baroque painters Juan Sanchez Cotån and Francisco de Zurbarån are major influences as are those by the 18th-century French master Jean-Baptiste-Siméon Chardin and the Italian painter Giorgio Morandi.
 
Weiskopf's paintings are noted for their visual acuity and tightly controlled compositions, wherein daringly arranged foodstuffs, seemingly poised on the edge of collapse, push to the forefront of the picture plane. According to the artist, her "paintings are more visual than narrative. They are about opposites, contrasts of tonal structure, color values and varying depths of space, creating a complicated visual experience within the precise format of still life." Weiskopf is also an accomplished landscape painter, frequently depicting the terrain that surrounds her summer home in the Siena region of Italy.

Weiskopf's works are held in museum collections including the Arkansas Art Center, Little Rock, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, which included her paintings in its national traveling exhibition and accompanying book, Still Life: The Object in American Art, 1915-1995, Selections from the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The artist divides her time between New Orleans, Louisiana, and central Italy.