The Collectors Circle
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Members View: Laura Engels

Laura Engels is a member of The Circle and works as an interior designer. Within her field, she sees art as the final ‘finishing touch’: Art makes your home and furnishings truly personal. She gives art advice on other people’s interiors, and artworks are also carefully selected in her own home. For this column, she chose to highlight the work “Body Language” (2019) by Amie Dicke.

“I was on a studio visit to Amie Dicke with The Collectors Circle a few years ago. It is always nice to be in an artist’s studio and be able to see how they work and where they get inspiration. Amie had a nice story about her making process. Photos from fashion magazines and newspapers, among others, are the source of her work. She is fascinated by the way models are portrayed. By editing those photos with different techniques, she wants to appropriate these images. Regularly, Amie goes to work with a surgical knife and then cuts away parts of an image. There was one work I was immediately captivated by. On the bike back I thought about how cool it would be to have that in my house, so later my husband and I went on another studio visit. In the end, we found it quite intense. It had a lot of dark colours and was just too small for the space where it would hang. Then we saw “Body Language”, which has softer colours and exudes tranquillity.

 

The organic shapes attract me, and also the way it floats in the frame, so to speak. You don’t immediately see clearly what you are looking at. This allows me to keep discovering new things. It is not something you can suddenly understand completely. I like the text “Make something happen please” because it works so well with the space. Here, it hangs very prominently in the entrance to our house. So as soon as you enter, you see that it is never a dull place here.

Last year, Amie had a solo exhibition in Utrecht at country house Oud-Amelisweerd, which is part of the Centraal Museum. We were then approached to ask if this work could also be exhibited there. It was the first time we had received such a request about an artwork, and I thought it was incredibly cool. In the end, “Body Language” even became the campaign image for the exhibition. Suddenly, we saw “our work” popping up in different places! We did look at a blank wall for six months, but it was also instant proof that this purchase really was a good catch for us.”

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