Amy Sillman
1955–

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.