Amy Sillman at Gladstone Gallery

Gladstone Gallery are exhibiting new paintings and drawings by Amy Sillman across two of their spaces in New York.

In lieu of a conventional press release, Sillman addresses gallery visitors with a poignant letter examining the effect of Covid-19 and the current political climate in America on her work as an artist, and how this changed the course of her practice in the months leading up to these exhibitions.

In doing so she reveals, ‘eventually it was the process of improvisation itself that seemed the most timely and urgent. I was thinking about a quote by Fred Moten, “improvisation is making nothing out of something”. In this sense “nothing” is a good thing, it means you’re in a hole, on the brink of change, and you have to listen, to pay attention. Improvising is a process that comes from within and that proposes a without, a nowhere that is everywhere. The hard questions continue (how to keep making paintings at all, if the world can possibly be rebuilt, and how) but I hope there’s an alchemy in there, a use, in keeping on working with the motion between the known and an abstract (but felt) unknown’.

Main image: Amy Sillman, window and leaf (2020). Acrylic, ink, and oil on canvas. Courtesy Gladstone Gallery.