Amy Sillman is known for a robust and physical kind of painting – of stormy abstractions, extroverted gestures, and spontaneous tremors of colour – but also for her interventions in writing, curating, humour, and digital animation. Born in Detroit and raised in Chicago, Sillman moved to New York in 1975, where she spent a decade developing her work. In the mid-1990s she began to establish herself as a painter, but also as a thinker and writer about art, with a practice that encompasses the publication of the zine The O.G., various iPhone/ iPad animations, and teaching and curating. Sillman’s prominence in refreshing gestural abstraction for the 21st century rests on an expansion of the vocabulary between figuration and abstraction. Setting the viewer’s expectations up for an experience of gestural painting, Sillman’s works relish in incongruity, or make us laugh. Evoking a film strip or a home movie, Sillman’s new work for The Milk of Dreams speaks to the concept of change. From the position of the viewer, her horizontal and tightly packed images form a fragmented spatial narrative. Incorporating disjointed body parts both human and animal, as well as a mixture of formal, narrative, and compositional approaches, the works are also scaled to the viewer’s own body – whose position and perspective changes with every step.
Madeline Weisburg
