Selected Press

Please click quotes to view PDF files

“Ellingson’s achievement is in the way these different associational levels are held together by an elegant compositional strategy. Nature and digital forms are made complementary through the economy and distribution of the digitally derived elements. The upshot is a sumptuous visual drift, an aesthetic space where the technological origins of the motifs are gathered up and renaturalized.”

--Paul Crowther, Geneses of Postmodern Art: Technology as Iconology

"This California-based artist’s first New York solo show presents paintings that are optically enthralling and sensuously tactile."

--Ken Johnson, The New York Times

“If you think of digital art as a soul-sucking realm of cold calculation destined to chip away at our humanity, Amy Ellingson shows the man-machine link to be an extension of her bodily instincts and neural impulses: realizations of a quest to develop forms that, she says, ‘confront the enormity of contemporary virtual experience’ while asserting ‘the humanness of painting.’”

—David M. Roth, Squarecylinder

“[Ellingson’s] patterned fields [are]...emotionally insinuating and hedonistically intimidating... It is computer technology that has made this possible. It allows Ellingson to revitalize what has become stale, decadent, historical.”

—Donald Kuspit, catalogue essay

“[Ellingson’s] vibrant works serve as markers for the contemporary visual experience, composed of combinations, traces and echos of the stimuli that course before our eyes on a daily basis.”

—René de Guzman, Bay Area Now 3 catalogue essay

“Ellingson's systems hit the eye instantaneously, suggesting sections of vast networks, such as the Web.”

—Mary MacNaughton, Matter & Matrix catalogue essay

“Ellingson painstakingly works in encaustic to build layer upon layer of pulsating line work, resulting in exhilarating optical plays upon vision and perception, testing our capacity to absorb visual information.” 

—Diana Daniels, Neo Mod: Recent Northern California Abstraction catalogue essay

“Amy Ellingson’s artwork probes into what we’re experiencing now: the use of digital tools to understand our world, which exists increasingly online.”

—Maritza Ruiz-Kim, "The Loop of Abstraction: Amy Ellingson at San Jose Institute of Contemporary Art"