Amy Sillman

Depicting both recognizable and reimagined forms, Amy Sillman's paintings push and pull between overt abstraction and ciphered figuration. In "To Be Other-Wise," Sillman lays bare the time and space in which abstraction is made through a sequential unfolding of thought and process. Her serial works on paper reveal an analog animation process, unfurling the various stages of mark-making that in paintings are compressed into buried layers. Sillman embraces an artistic process that champions improvisation and challenges conventional notions of form and representation.

 

Sillman’s work in painting and drawing has been shaped by her basic notion of art-making as a conduit for change. Rather than working toward beauty or grandeur, Sillman’s work proposes a cheerfully skeptical attitude toward traditional categories (such as abstraction or figuration). Instead, she continuously re-investigates various formal structures – figure and ground, color and line, painting and drawing, representation and non-representation – as dichotomies that her work refutes through the presentation of energetic figures within liminal grounds. With this sense of an activated present, Sillman emancipates viewers from the preconceived expectations of a “finished” piece that captures a singular moment, stating that “each work is a continual painterly process of destruction and recreation, often going on for months before it comes to a kind of conclusion, a conclusion which is itself an open question.”

 

This book is published on the occasion of the exhibition "Amy Sillman: To Be Other-Wise" at Gladstone, New York and features an essay by Felix Bernstein. 

 

Published by Gladstone, 2024

 

Softcover
English
148 Pages
8 1/2 x 10 5/8 inches; 21.5 x 27.5 cm
ISBN 979-8-89342-368-6