Amy Sillman's paintings and drawings, the heart of her practice, are highly process-based and created in a manner the artist describes as 'intensely physical'. Her artworks, produced off the cuff, often follow trains of thought carried over from previous works.
Read MoreIn her paintings and drawings, Sillman deploys a vibrant visual language of bright colours, applied in a flurry of gestural movements—scraping, erasing, and over-painting. Boundaries of colour and line are blurred, as too are distinctions between figure and ground.
Me & Ugly Mountain (2003), an early work, typifies the lyrical beginnings of Sillman's subversion of male-dominated 20th-century abstraction. Employing a bright 'feminine' palette of vivid and pastel hues, the artist decoratively renders a lone female figure dragging a massive sack of abstract forms across a white mountainside. With humour and pathos, the painting alludes to the Greek myth of Sisyphus and universal sensations of human isolation.
From the mid-2000s, Sillman began to make paintings that hint at figurative forms buried beneath an abstract surface of colourful forms and lines. Among some of the key works highlighted in Sillman's book One Lump or Two (2013)—which accompanied her first major museum retrospective—is The Elephant in the Room (2006).
Comprised of planes of colour and horizontal and vertical lines, the pachyderm-evoking painting is a study in shapes and abstraction. Set against an ethereal yellow background underlined by a vivid orange band, green vertical lines and curves contrast with horizontal bands of orange, lavender, and blue. Titular allusion determines the meaning of this abstract arrangement of forms, as it does with many of her later abstract works, giving figurative meaning to the trunk-like form. Sillman states unequivocally to ArtForum that the elephant in the room is sex.
Often Sillman's work is made in layers as she returns to works she began earlier to alter their form, seeking out new visual possibilities. Amy Sillman's Camden Arts Centre show Landline (2019) presents a clothesline of recent paintings that tangibly serialises that process.
Suspended from a high ceiling in a line across the middle of the room, each work in her 'Dubstamp' (2018) series relates to one next to it. Sharing basic formal elements such as the abstracted figure on its back, variations appear in aspects of shape, colour, form, and ground.
Amy Sillman's Chicago silkscreening days also seep back into her practice in this series and other recent works, where the artist incorporates the techniques and method in place of a traditional canvas for painting or drawing.
Pushing beyond the boundaries of conventional painting, Sillman also produces zines, drawings, and animations made on iPads and iPhones. Since the late-2000s, Sillman has made several works that highlight digital devices as a viable medium.
In one such work titled Thirteen Possible Futures: Cartoon for a Painting (2012), Sillman presents a series of scenes—from a searchlight in the dark to a rabbit talking on a therapist's couch—rendered with thousands of frames hand-drawn on an iPad. Originally paired with the painting Duel (2011), the animation explores the various directions the painting might have taken had she continued to work on it.
