To Abstract
Amy Sillman
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Marking, whittling, struggling, scumbling, contradicting, and abstracting, artist Amy Sillman wrestles with the history and materiality of painting, reinvigorating the medium with new references and perspectives. In her Brooklyn studio, the artist works improvisationally using various nontraditional and ad-hoc tools to scrape, wipe, and wash off the paint she applies to the canvas in an ongoing process of editing and revision.
Graduating from the School of Visual Arts in 1979, Sillman sought to apply the experimental and improvisational practices of the 1970s and 1980s New York City art scene to the realm of contemporary painting. Her broad span of artistic references extends to her peers working outside of the discipline such as Kurt Kren, the Kipper Kids, and Ishmael Houston-Jones; however her work also references the spirit of formal playfulness in Eva Hesse, Louise Bourgeois, and Maria Lassing. This spirit is something Sillman identifies in her other influences like the gestural painters of The New York School, however the artist believes that this playfulness from these works had become lost as they became idealized commodities. “It was an anti-heroic position that had to be remade in painting,” Sillman says. “I’m rebuilding something from a much more scrappy and casual and weird position.”
In her practice, Sillman identifies two distinct modes of making, she says “I make these paintings that are a million layers that you can only see the top of and then I make these long horizontal drawing and printmaking sequences.” In her 2023 exhibition at Thomas Dane Gallery in Naples, Italy, the artist brings these two modes of production together in Temporary Object (2023), a series of 41 photographs printed on aluminum plates that document the process of creating a single painting. “You go to trouble, then you get out of trouble, then you get back in trouble,” says the artist of her process. “So trouble, or not trouble, getting to it and getting away from it, and getting from one trouble to the other trouble is the unit.”
Though Sillman is a celebrated writer, with her essays compiled in publications like Amy Sillman: Faux Pas (2020), her painting, drawing, and printmaking practices cannot be fully understood through language. “This is a non-linguistic activity that, you know, on some level is foiled by language,” says the artist. “So, to answer these questions is an impossibility.”
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About the artists
Amy Sillman was born in Detroit, MI in 1955 and is currently based in New York City, NY. The artist received her BFA from the School of Visual Arts in 1979, and later her MFA from Bard College in 1995. In her decades-long career, Sillman has developed a practice that defies neat categorization as she builds tensions between binaries, mediums, histories, and styles. Encompassing painting, drawing, printmaking, animation, zine-making, and writing, the artist both borrows from and complicates art historical periods and schools. Known for her process-based paintings that move ambivalently between figuration and abstraction, the artist approaches the medium as an endeavor that is simultaneously intuitive and formal, bodily and thought-based, material and conceptual.
