Amy Sillman

Amy Sillman, Split 2, oil and acrylic on canvas, 75" x 66", 2020.

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, and Interview, characterize Sillman as championing "the relevance of painting"

Education and early career Sillman was born in Detroit, Michigan in 1955 and raised in Chicago. She exhibited sporadically, participating in group shows at PS 122, New Museum, Drawing Center and PS1, among others. 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 subsequently taught at the Städelschule in Frankfurt, Germany.

Amy Sillman, Detail from The Umbrian Line, gouache, ink, pencil on paper, approx. 9" x 12", 2000; entire work, 25 sections approx. 15" x 400" total.

Work and reception 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. 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). 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. Reviews described the slightly askew compositions of the paintings as evoking a sense of looming things on the verge of tottering over, or of shifting ground—a reflection of a fraught year plagued by the COVID pandemic.

Zines, writing and curating In 2009, while living in Berlin, Sillman began producing a zine, The O-G, that she often paired with her exhibitions or paintings; in 2020 it had reached its fourteenth issue. 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.

Sillman has written about art and artists for catalogues and journals such as Artforum, ARTnews, Texte zur Kunst, and Frieze. which includes essays on John Chamberlain, Eugène Delacroix, Rachel Harrison, Laura Owens, and contemporary painting's inheritances from Abstract Expressionism. The MoMA show, "The Shape of Shape" (assembled with MoMA curator Michelle Kuo and Jenny Harris), gathered 75 objects from the museum's collection, from well-known artists to some that never exhibited at MoMA; Roberta Smith wrote that the show's "robust visual appetite" addressed the "fear of painting, color and form" that has allowed contemporary painting to lose ground to conceptual art and its derivatives. election to the American Academy of Arts and Letters (2020), and awards from the National Endowment for the Arts (1995), She has received awards from the Joan Mitchell, Louis Comfort Tiffany and Pollock-Krasner foundations, the American Academy in Berlin (2009), and Brooklyn Museum (2012), among others.

Her work belongs to the public collections of the Art Institute of Chicago, Baltimore Museum of Art, Blanton Museum of Art, Brooklyn Museum, Hammer Museum, Metropolitan Museum of Art, Milwaukee Art Museum, Moderna Museet (Stockholm), Museum Brandhorst (Munich), Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art of Trento and Rovereto (MART), Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, MoMA, Saatchi Gallery, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Tate Modern, Weatherspoon Art Museum, and Whitney Museum, among others. Whitney Museum, Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston, and Portikus (Frankfurt). Her work was included in the 2024 exhibition Making Their Mark: Works from the Shah Garg Collection at the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive (BAMPFA).