Amy Sillman

[1][2][3] 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.

[4][5][6] Profiles in The New York Times, ARTnews,[3] Frieze,[7] and Interview,[8] characterize Sillman as championing "the relevance of painting"[2] and "a reinvigorated mode of abstraction reclaiming the potency of active brushwork and visible gestures.

[32] 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.

[25][35][30] 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.

[5][35][29] 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.

[2][45][46] 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.

[13][41][8] 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.

She silkscreened the originals at a larger size and worked into them; Artforum wrote of its simultaneously playful and violent effect: "broken-up, magnified, and displaced shapes step into the breach of a world de-constituting itself as objective reality.

"[42][34][41] Sillman's 2020 exhibition, "Twice Removed," (Gladstone) juxtaposed large, improvisational canvases and paper works—layers of silk-screened polka-dot passages, calligraphic swoops, stripes and brushed stains of color, and hints of figuration—with a surprising new body of work: small, delicate flower still lifes.

[33][48][50] The O-G has included a wide range of material: cartoons, satiric art-world dinner seating charts, essays, visual and textual pieces fleshing out threads in Sillman's art, as well as work by other artists and writers.

[31][6] She has published four collections of her writing, the last being Faux Pas (2020, After 8 Books, Paris),[53] which includes essays on John Chamberlain, Eugène Delacroix, Rachel Harrison, Laura Owens, and contemporary painting's inheritances from Abstract Expressionism.