Molly Van Amerongen

Molly Van Amerongen is an Irish painter living and working in London.

Having grown up in rural Ireland, after which she spent extended periods in India and Mexico City, she has become increasingly interested in how places — both domestic and exotic — insinuate their identities and their differences, through colour, texture and materials.

Molly is interested in how the body absorbs and records pleasure and trauma. Her work is in this sense autobiographical, a rite of passage, a way of recording the relationship between memory and imagination, the trace of some previous and transient action, the past seen from a possible future.

Drawing, with its play of clarity and space, is an important part of Molly’s process — as performance — while painting is a re-enactment, involving the slow materiality of oil paint, pigments, collage, drips and washes, creating a surface tension between control and chance.

“Colours are the deeds and sufferings of light” Goethe