AMY SILLMAN

Early Years

Amy Sillman was born in Detroit in 1955. Before choosing to follow art as a career, she worked at a cannery in Alaska and a silkscreen factory in Chicago, as well as training to be a Japanese interpreter at New York University. In New York City during the 1970s, Sillman saw that painting was being criticised as a practice and that her friends were improvising in other fields, such as music or filmmaking. She adopted an improvisational practice in her painting, playing with process and form. She graduated from the School of Visual Arts in New York City with a BFA in 1979.

Amy Sillman: Artworks

“Abstraction... is an experience for understanding certain kinds of physical and formal relations: space, colour, time, weight, heaviness, lightness, ugliness, beauty,” Amy Sillman said in 2024. She produces paintings by adding layers of paint, ink or silkscreen-printed motifs, then removing areas of colour with scrapers, paper towels, sticks or water. She also makes long, horizontal installations of paintings or print, as well as producing zines, notably The OG.

• Sillman’s 2006 painting Psychology Today is an oil painting that places scratchy strokes on top of bright blocks of colour. Is it showing us the turmoil of the subject’s inner thoughts?
• During lockdown, Sillman moved to Long Island and produced a huge amount of work. “I made, literally, a titanic amount of work during the Covid period,” she said in 2020. In contrast to her abstract practice, she made many still lifes of flowers, from peonies to sunflowers.
• Mug (2023) is an acrylic and oil piece in shades of red and green, suggesting the outline of a human head but also referencing the idea that we can hold a lot of thoughts and feelings at once, which can sometimes appear chaotic.

Amy Sillman: Select Exhibtions

Select Solo Exhibitions

• Amy Sillman: Alternate Side (Permutations #1–32), Dia Bridgehampton, New York City (2025)
• Amy Sillman (with Marina Rosenfeld, sound): Minute Cinema: 4 videos for 4 seasons, Capitain Petzel, Berlin (2025)
• Amy Sillman: Oh, Clock!, Kunstmuseum Bern (2024)
• Amy Sillman: To Be Other-Wise, Gladstone Gallery, New York City (2024)
• Amy Sillman: Temporary Object, Thomas Dane Gallery, Naples (2023) (and touring)
• Amy Sillman: After Metamorphoses, Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum, St Louis (2021)
• Amy Sillman: Twice Removed, Gladstone Gallery, New York City (2020)
• Amy Sillman: The Nervous System, The Arts Club of Chicago (2019)
• Amy Sillman: Landline, Camden Arts Centre, London (2018)
• Amy Sillman: stuff change, Sikkema Jenkins, New York City (2016)
• Amy Sillman: one lump or two, Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston (2013) (and touring)
• Amy Sillman: Thumb Cinema, Capitain Petzel, Berlin (2011)
• Directions, Amy Sillman: Third Person Singular, Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington DC (2008) (and touring)
• Amy Sillman: Person, Place, or Thing, carlier | gebauer, Berlin (2007)
• Amy Sillman: Suitors and Strangers, Blaffer Gallery, Art Museum of the University of Houston (2007)
• Amy Sillman: Horizon Line, University of North Texas Art Gallery (2004)
• A Long Drawing: a project by Amy Sillman, Brent Sikkema, New York City (2002)
• Amy Sillman: Paintings, Susanne Vielmetter Los Angeles Projects (2002)
• Amy Sillman, Brent Sikkema, New York City (2000)
• Amy Sillman, Casey Kaplan, New York City (1996)
• Amy Sillman, Ledia Flam Gallery, New York City (1991)

Select Group Exhibitions

• Clever, Quick, Magnetic: The Art of Witty Banter, Oklahoma Contemporary (2026)
• Gender, Genre, Generation: Women Painting Abstraction, Sheldon Museum of Art, University of Nebraska (2026)
• Chorus, Lumber Room, Portland (2025)
• The Atomic Age: Artists Put to the Test by History, Musée d’Art Moderne de Paris (2024)
• In the House of the Trembling Eye, Aspen Art Museum (2024)
• Making Their Mark, Shah Garg Foundation, New York City (2023) (and touring)
• Artists for New York, Hauser & Wirth, New York City (2020)
• Inhabiting Words, Concord Centre for the Visual Art (2017)
• Whitney Biennial 2014, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York City (2014)
• The Medium of Contingency, Thomas Dane, London (2011)
• Landscape Revisited, Park Avenue Armory, New York City (2009)
• The Good, The Bad and the Ugly, New Langton Arts, San Francisco (2007)
• Dana Schutz, Amy Sillman, Kara Walker, Brent Sikkema, New York City (2004)
• Greater New York, MoMA PS1_, New York City (2000)
• Pop Surrealism, The Aldrich Museum, Ridgefield (1998)
• International Graphics Biennial, Gyor (1995)
• The Painting Project, Part 1, Four Walls, New York City (1991)
• Artists Books, Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago (1987)
• On View: Michael Byron, Lisa Hoke, Amy Sillman, New Museum, New York City (1984)

Further Reading

• Amy Sillman’s official website
• 2024 interview with Art21
• 2020 interview from The New York Times
• Artist profile page at David Zwirner

Amy Sillman FAQs

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