Isabella Amram’s Artistic Practice: A Dialogue Between the Tactile and the Transcendental
Isabella Amram’s work emerges from the interplay between the material and the immaterial. Through mark-making, she explores themes of presence, absence, and transformation, creating paintings where materiality and energy converge. Her canvases become spaces of flux—both containing and releasing her experience of being in the world.
Central to her visual language is the use of iterative marks and lines that traverse the canvas, creating a sense of dynamism and tension. Each mark builds upon the previous one, acting as a conduit for intangible energies. While these gestures often resemble script or symbols, they remain deliberately unreadable—suggesting communication without fixed meaning. This ambiguity mirrors the core of her practice, where every gesture embodies both material substance and open-ended interpretation, leaving viewers suspended between sensation and understanding.
As these lines intersect, layer, and dissolve, they form shifting fields of connection and disconnection, reflecting the transient and layered nature of existence. This dynamic interplay invites the viewer to explore relationships across the canvas, uncovering moments of harmony and disruption.
Amram’s process is deeply physical. She engages her entire body in the act of creation, treating the surface as an arena for movement, gesture, and sensation. Her techniques—crouching, rubbing, stabbing, caressing, erasing, layering, and diluting—bring an expressive energy to the work. The colors she employs range from vibrant, pulsating hues to muted, grounding tones. Layers of color are scraped, blended, and built up to create a sense of vibration, tension, and resolution across the surface.
Her work is influenced by philosophical ideas of phenomenology, emergence, and undecidability, exploring existence as a layered and ever-changing process. She draws inspiration from diverse sources, including tantric energy work, microscopic and macroscopic imagery, and ancient occult traditions such as astrology, alchemy, magic, Kabbalah, and Hermeticism.
Additionally, Amram’s practice is informed by the visionary works of Hilma af Klint, William Blake, and Ithell Colquhoun, whose explorations of unseen realms resonate with her own. The lyrical abstraction of Joan Mitchell and Cath Goodman, as well as Carolee Schneemann’s kinetic painting and body art, further inspire her embodied approach to mark-making.
Alongside these artistic and philosophical influences, a dedicated meditative practice plays a crucial role in Amram’s work, emphasizing concentrated presence and intention. This fusion of artistic exploration and lived experience imbues her paintings with both mystery and depth, inviting viewers into a world where material and energy are in constant dialogue.