Amie Dicke’s OPEN ARMS exhibition is currently on display at the Anat Ebgi Gallery in New York City from September 6 to October 19. In her fourth solo show with the gallery, Dicke introduces new works from her recent sandpaper abrasion and cosmetics series, created over the past year. Also featured is a fresh installation of her intriguing ‘sugar books.’ These stories lose their narrative as sugar crystals envelop and obscure their pages, rendering them unreadable. What remains are luminous, pristine, textless surfaces — stunning, tactile, yet stripped of purpose.

Dicke is an “image defacer.” Her methods blur, smear, and warp the original material, breaking it down in unexpected ways. With a sharp eye for the overlooked, she zeroes in on peculiar details — a subtle gap between legs, a misshapen bedspread — redirecting our attention with deliberate care. Like a visual detective, she follows her instincts, approaching her work from unconventional angles. Guided by gut feeling and insight, she senses hidden potential within an image, which she then manipulates, whether by erasure, distortion, or enhancement. The result is a transformed piece, redefined by the tension and harmony of conflicting elements.

Dicke’s technique, whether layering lipstick or liquid foundation, or stripping away with sandpaper, is driven by an instinctive response to the raw emotional energy she finds in her imagery. She also draws from sources as varied as fashion magazines, catalogs, and art history. In “Nude” (2024), she reimagines Manet’s “Olympia,” transforming the muse-turned-victim into a canvas for her intense physical engagement. The surface bears the marks of her interventions, with sandpaper abrasions erasing the iconic nude and servant figures. These rubbed-out scars resonate like Jasper Johns’ dynamic cross-hatching or Lucio Fontana’s violent slashes, invoking a sense of rupture and disruption.

Throughout her career, Dicke has consistently engaged with sugar as a medium, beginning with “How sweet is the space between my legs?” (2000), where she cast the void between her legs in marzipan and sugar. Her fascination lies in sugar's fleeting nature — it can dissolve, melt, solidify, and most intriguingly, be consumed. Once inside the body, it merges with the bloodstream; overindulge, and the consequences are inevitable. In the gallery, her splayed pages feel raw and exposed, as though unearthed and stripped to their core, poised for transformation. Dicke’s work seeks to crystallize intimacy through deep observation, challenging preconceptions. By repetitively deconstructing forms, she believes new layers are revealed through her acts of erasure creating space and distance.

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