Amy Sillman

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.

Sillman was born in Detroit, Michigan in 1955 and raised in Chicago.

At age 19, she moved to New York to study Japanese, but shifted to art, earning a BFA at the School of Visual Arts in 1979.

During that time, she immersed herself in ongoing debates about the viability of contemporary painting and became involved with the downtown feminist and counterculture movements, as an assistant to artist Pat Steir and a member and contributor of the feminist journal Heresies.

She exhibited sporadically, participating in group shows at PS 122, New Museum, Drawing Center and PS1, among others.

She began gaining attention in the mid-1990s for solo exhibitions at Lipton Owens Company, Casey Kaplan, and in the early 2000s, Brent Sikkema (later called Sikkema Jenkins).

During that period, Sillman earned an MFA from Bard College (1995) and joined the school's art faculty in 1996.

She taught in Bard's MFA painting program from 1997 to 2013, and served as chair of the painting department from 2002 to 2013.

She subsequently taught at the Städelschule in Frankfurt, Germany.

Sillman's art combines traditional formal concerns—explorations of color, shape, surface and line, play with figure and ground, scale, and flat versus recessive space—that she complicates with approaches from other media (drawing, cartoons, collage, animation) and unconventional display strategies.

She employs an interior, personal process—largely grounded in drawing—that involves constructing, deconstructing and reconstructing the painting space through layers of transformation, improvised action and redaction.

Artforum critic Linda Norden wrote that this commitment to "constructive erasure" and "unpainting" distinguishes Sillman from Abstract expressionists (e.g., de Kooning and Guston) that she is compared to.

Sillman's art is marked by a direct engagement with materials and radical shifts in palette, brushwork, scale and the structuring logic of either drawing or painting.

Critics attribute the dialectical quality of her work—playful, incisive humor and angst, comic awkwardness and prowess, figuration and abstraction—to these shifts.

Sillman's earlier work moved between figure, landscape and abstraction, fusing loose painting and drawing into what reviews described as dreamlike, absurd or wistful psychological narratives.

Rendered in cheery, vaguely acidic palettes, these paintings depicted simple, self-contained figures—often a small, Eve-like woman wandering open grounds—amid Boschian piles of biomorphic shapes, abstract scumbles, drips and calligraphic linework.

New York Times critic Roberta Smith noted their dense "undergrowth" of imagery and "translucent delicacy," which she wrote, "pok[ed] fun at painting's often masculine sense of bravura, while offering alternative forms of turbulence and power."

In the mid-2000s, Sillman's heap-like compositions gave way to an enlarged scale, broader, more physical gestures and explorations of the body, interpersonal dynamics, the erotic and psychosexual tension.

Helen Molesworth wrote that paintings such as Me and Ugly Mountain (2003)—which depicts a lone figure dragging, an enormous bundle of shapes, scrawls and "neurotic energy" by a thinly painted line—shifted the feminist critique of the gaze from the structure of representation to the feelings that arise when one is aware of being looked at.

These works consisted of patches of high-contrast color bursting with chaotic line and web-like scaffolding, open fields of subtly modulated color, and crude figurative elements emerging along compositional fault lines or out of rough edges and thickets of brushstrokes (The Elephant in the Room, 2006).

In 2007, Sillman began creating large gestural abstract paintings based on black-and-white drawings she made from observing couple friends in casual moments of domestic intimacy.

She recreated the original drawings from memory, then rotated and reworked them into abstract painting "templates."

The paintings consisted of richly hued, abutting trapezoidal shapes on flat picture planes, which were crisscrossed and circumscribed by bold angular, diagrammatic lines reminiscent of architecture or sculptural construction.

She exhibited the paintings and drawings at the Hirshhorn Museum in 2008; Artforum described the drawings as "equally tender and ruthless" in touch and economical in their markmaking.

Sillman mounted several exhibitions in the 2010s that were noted for their invention, restlessness and new formats that emphasized temporal aspects of her work.

Her first major museum retrospective, "one lump or two" at the Institute of Contemporary Art (2013), included paintings rooted in a smartphone drawing application and cartoons, diagrams, zines and "animated drawings" that Artforum 's Cameron Martin wrote, "pack just as much of a wallop as her starkly physical canvases."

The initial animated drawings expanded on or reworked variations of individual paintings and were displayed on small screens, reflecting the modest scale of their creation.

The shows "the All-Over" (Portikus, 2016) and "Mostly Drawing" (Gladstone 2018) featured sequential, end-to-end installations (like film frames or accordion books) of multi-media works combining silkscreened or ink-jet printed, painted and drawn elements.

Their layered networks of figurative elements, abstract gesture and blended color passages created a sense of metamorphic transformation across pieces and effaced lines between reproduction and spontaneity, painting and print.

Frieze critic Elisa R. Linn wrote of Panorama (2016), "traces of [Sillman's] thinking coalesce on the canvas, revealing fragile forms apparently stuck in the constant process of their own remaking."

In 2017, Sillman presented After Metamorphoses (The Drawing Center), a five-minute, looped and projected animated drawing that was her most complex and ambitious to date.

It condensed Ovid’s fifteen-book epic poem Metamorphoses into a shape-shifting amalgamation of abstract painting and layered, interpenetrating forms and landscapes.

Its digitally drawn shapes and characters underwent strange, sometimes mythical or comical mutations in a manic rhythm that extended the figuration-abstraction oscillation characteristic of her broader practice.

Sillman presented less process-oriented work marked by current-day political concerns in the exhibition "Landline" (Camden Arts Centre, London, 2018).

The show included "Dub Stamp" (2018), twelve double-sided works on paper hung on a diagonally stretched cord, which were based on drawings of a figure crawling along abjectly in the aftermath of the 2016 U.S. presidential election.