d. 1987
Amodio studied music, architecture, and painting in his native country of Uruguay before emigrating to the US in 1964. He started painting exclusively in 1966 in New York. On Nantucket he teamed up with Dean Taylor and Pat Gardner to form a visual arts gallery, PAD, at Pat’s property on Hummock Pond Road. From 1969-71 he partnered with Dean Taylor in the Amodio-Taylor Gallery at 45 Orange Street.
He exhibited at the Main Street Gallery in its early years, and he had an exhibition of 30 pastel drawings in 8.5 inch circular format at the Little Gallery in 1971.
In the I&M in August 1971 he said, “I started working with the circle last summer. I have seen some Japanese paintings done inside a circle. A composition inside a circle is more difficult to balance, to make look like a painting and not like a plate…that’s the danger. You can become decorative.”
He studied on scholarship at Haystack Mountain School of Crafts, on Deer Island, ME.
ANDREAS AMODIO worked in abstract, on the whole, but he occasionally uses the figure when the need arises. He uses all media — oil, ink, acrylic, enamel, pastel and gouache. Amodio begins a painting with no preconceived idea about the final result. He believes a painting should be allowed to grow according to its own laws. Dean Taylor’s paintings are quite different — less emotional, and without the lyrical quality that appears so often in Amodio’s work. He tends toward pure hard-edged design in bold color. Dean very often begins a painting in the center of the canvas, working out to the edge relating shape to shape and color to color, rarely changing the forms in the center. He feels the edge of the canvas is a restriction and has begun to work on separate squares of canvas, joining them together and adding as the painting grows. There is another facet to Dean’s work. He is now working on constructions in wool, using the crochet needle to weave his basic material. He combines unusual designs in different proportions and then wires them to stand as sculpture. He has also worked extensively in papier mache, combined with other materials, creating fascinating masks.