Amy Sillman
1955–

Through her art and writings, Amy Sillman has played a significant role in the resurgence of American painting since the mid-1990s and in the artistic discourse that surrounds it. Although known primarily for her large-scale oil paintings— works at once rigorous and playful that hover between abstraction and figuration, executed in surprising color palettes— drawing is a crucial part of the way she works. “I think the core of my practice is completely drawing,” she has said. Sillman has explored language and image in this medium and, more recently, has used contemporary technology such as the iPhone to make drawings that she then translates into animated films.

Untitled April Drawing 3, Version 2 and Version 3 were part of a group of more than a dozen drawings on which Sillman worked serially, one leading to another in an instinctive process of formal experimentation. In her oil paintings Sillman works through many stages, each successive reworking responding to previous gestures and strokes yet leading to a final composition that may look nothing like the one with which she began. The more naked medium of drawing lays this process bare so that we can see how her compositional tinkerings progress from one sheet to the next. Here, the faucet/phallic shape becomes pinched and tightened into two separate forms, while the background shapes sharpen from washy curves into thinner, darker lines. Many of the traditional dichotomies associated with working in two dimensions—line/color, figure/ground, flatness/space—play out lyrically before us in these two works.

Introduction

Amy Sillman (born 1955) is a New York-based visual artist, known for process-based paintings that move between abstraction and figuration, and engage nontraditional media including animation, zines and installation. Her work draws upon art historical tropes, particularly postwar American gestural painting, as both influences and foils; she engages feminist critiques of the discourses of mastery, genius and power in order to introduce qualities such as humor, awkwardness, self-deprecation, affect and doubt into her practice. Profiles in The New York Times, ARTnews, Frieze, and Interview, characterize Sillman as championing "the relevance of painting" and "a reinvigorated mode of abstraction reclaiming the potency of active brushwork and visible gestures." Critic Phyllis Tuchman described Sillman as "an inventive abstractionist" whose "messy, multivalent, lively" art "reframes long-held notions regarding the look and emotional character of abstraction."

Sillman has exhibited at institutions including the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), Whitney Museum, Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston, and Portikus (Frankfurt). She has received a Guggenheim Fellowship and awards from the Joan Mitchell, Louis Comfort Tiffany and Pollock-Krasner foundations, and her art belongs to the public collections of MoMA, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and Tate Modern, among other recognition.

Amy Sillman is represented by Gladstone Gallery.