Andi Magenheimer

Born in Connecticut in 1984, Andi Magenheimer earned her BFA from The School of Visual Arts, NYC and her MA in Painting from the Royal College of Art. She has exhibited widely in recent years, with solo shows in New York, Los Angeles and London.

Over the past five years, artist, and musician Andi Magenheimer has lived and worked between London, Los Angeles and New York. This peripatetic lifestyle is reflected in the diversity of subjects she introduces into her paintings and drawings, and in her music, which she performs under the name ‘Dusty Miller’. Magenheimer’s spirited sense of humour and razor-sharp use of language are evident across art forms, whether in Self-Portrait as a Ham Sandwich (2017), or in the ‘sad cowboy’ songs she writes. Mindful of the conventions of painterly style and subject matter, she gleefully flouts aesthetic tropes and breathes new life into tired clichés.

The Quietus © Ellen Mara De Wachter 2017

“I gather ideas every morning by looking at quite a wide range of news sources, from the BBC to Huffington Post to the New York Times or the Guardian. That informs my general cynicism! And then I have lots of coffee and I start combining ideas and trying to get, if not happy, then at least to be doing something until I can process it all. At the moment I am interested in skeletons, and I’m trying to push skeletons into being surprising and stupid and funny all at the same time. They are definitely overused as an art trope, not least with the memento mori device, but I think it is interesting to try to have the moment of death be a moment of surprise. People either take it too seriously or not seriously enough and there’s got to be a third way that involves jokes – for example, the animated skeletons in early cartoons.”

The Quietus © Andi Magenheimer 2017

“There is a sense of faith in her sustained expression and in her restless quest to find a place and a venue. Her life on the internet and in actual spaces give the sense of a presence that also finds some company in Leon Kossoff, Lucien Freud, Francis Bacon, and Damien Hirst, and perhaps even reaches back to James Dean... Perhaps too she is kindred spirits with Judy Pfaff and Louisa Chase, Joan Brown, Gloria Stettheimer, Kyle Staver, and Katherine Bradford in her spirit of exuberance and playfulness. The dynamism of her appearances in video, online, in exhibitions, has an edgey, searching, thrill-of-the-ride aspect, a kind of on-going Day of the Dead parade, especially in the recent images from Sensei Gallery.

This artist, Andi Magenheimer, in her irreverent sense of humor, in her taking chances, in her quest, and in her creativity, is being herself and she insists (in her persistence and in her need to create) on being someone to be heard and seen.”

ANDI MAGENHEIMER/DUSTY MILLER © Grier Torrence 2018

“She’s known around the dive bars for her hand-painted portraits on jean jackets of unexpected, but entirely justifable, denim heros. Tolstoy, Zizek, Michel Houellebecq, Nina Simone — even NY Times art critic, Roberta Smith have all been lovingly depicted, among a plethora of authors and auteurs. She also plays music under the name Dusty Miller, calling the style “a kind of confused mixture of Linda Perhacs, Jandek, and vocal ideas stolen from Bulgarian folk singing, but my mom says I should call them Alien Ballads,” she adds with a laugh. But the main focus for the multitalented Andi Magenheimer has been traditional painting with oils.”

A Portrait of the Artist: Andi Magenheimer © Monsier le Moustache 2016

“In 2015, her work began utilizing social media platforms such as instagram as a means of deploying an enormous body of work-- one strand of which is collage self portraiture using traditional wet and dry drawing and painting media and the artist's own reflection. Other series of works on paper have wide-ranging themes and concerns-- from dead serious slaptick on the need for gun control regulation, take-no-prisoners mockery of herself as an artist and the art world in general, to the immortality of the fart joke.”

Creative Ground 2017

“What everyone in the whole world wants, according to the Vedanta, is freedom from labels and limitations. Our egos dictate to us who we are and what we must desire, wear, and how to express what that self is. What I have always wanted has been to find the best and most honest ways to express my thoughts and feelings— that best expression being ways that relate those concepts beautifully, to eliminate internal resistance (of the self or viewer) with harmony and rhythm, color, texture, composition, and so on. Singing and playing guitar and painting and drawing form a vital nexus for self-expression. Other modes have been part of my creative vocabulary in the past, acting, writing fiction and poetry, designing clothes— so many things have fallen away to bring attention to these two ancient, and therefore known and testable, forms of creative work. These modes of expression function in parallel ways to the same end, with their own advantages and limitations. Painting is an isolating, private endeavor until it is brought forth in an exhibition. The same goes for practicing music up to a performance, unless bringing in other musicians to add to the depth of the sound. If nothing else, shifting gears between the two things allows for breathing space— as it would be inconceivably sad to grow bored and irritable with making the intangible tangible.”

Andi Magenheimer, 2022

“I play a lot of death songs. In all seriousness I think this began when a friend of mine’s brother was shot in Arizona, and at the same time I was going through a breakup, and a man was shot on my street in Los Angeles and my neighbour and I ran down to try to help. So death was everywhere, but it also seemed banal at the same time. It’s like the Talking Heads song ‘Heaven’, which goes ‘Heaven is a place where nothing happens’: death is in some ways the most boring thing that could happen to you… I write sad cowboy songs too”

The Quietus © Andi Magenheimer 2017