Amy Sillman
b. 1955
“My whole impetus in making art, making work, writing, drawing,” painter Amy Sillman recounted in a 2020 interview, “is to function as a kind of combination bricoleur, flaneur, voyeur, radish farmer, auto mechanic, and take parts, and with my labor, remake a strange new language.”1 Sillman’s “strange new language” comes from her lifelong interest in undoing art-historical notions of mastery, power, and genius, instead favoring doubt, unknowability, and intimacy as integral to art making. She is best known for process-based oil paintings that are both abstract and representational, but Sillman often pushes the medium into unconventional and experimental territory, including zines, installations, and iPad animations. She draws from a diverse array of references, from Surrealist literature to Internet memes, and her paintings blur distinctions between color and line, figure and ground, all the while remaining sensitive to the body, emotion, and humor. Psychology Today (2006), a profile rendered in bright, unusual colors covered in scratchy diagram-like strokes, is an example of the way her paintings mine humor—employing cartoons, visual jokes, and puns—but also don’t shy away from…
Films