AMY SILLMAN

Sillman’s work in painting and drawing has been shaped by her basic notion of artmaking as a conduit forchange. Rather than working toward beauty or grandeur, Sillman’s work proposes a cheerfully skepticalattitude toward traditional categories (such as abstraction or figuration). Instead, she continuouslyre-investigates various formal structures – figure and ground, colour and line, painting and drawing,representation and nonrepresentation – as dichotomies that her work refutes through the presentation ofenergetic figures within liminal grounds. With this sense of an activated present, Sillman emancipates viewersfrom the preconceived expectations of a ‘finished’ piece that captures a singular moment, stating that ‘eachwork is a continual painterly process of destruction and recreation, often going on for months before it comesto a kind of conclusion, a conclusion which is itself an open question.’

For Sillman shape, colour, and drawing prevail, but always in a state of flux and situated within the context oftime. Her depiction of torsos signifies more than just the human form: they embody a broader contemplationof transformation and temporal fluidity. In this exhibition, she presents a sequence of 74 works on paperselected from a larger body of work that juxtaposes torsos with words, arranged horizontally across the gallerywall as a diagrammatic grid. Through these visceral depictions, but in all of her paintings as well, Sillman seeksto reveal the fragile and often disjointed state of being, creating scenes that reflect the body’s entanglementwith its own sense of disembodiment and alienation. Investigating the complicated relationship between theobject, subject, and the abject, the artist’s continuum of images contends with both a philosophical andphysical consciousness. This ongoing examination of both the body and structures of form and languageoffers a lens through which to view the broader questions the artist addresses in her work—theimpermanence of form, the shifting interplay between affect and cognition, and the continuous cycle ofcreation and deconstruction in her practice.

Press release courtesy Gladstone Gallery