Amy Sillman

A prolifically creative artistic polymath, American artist Amy Sillman (b. 1955) works in drawing, zines, iPhone videos, installation, collaboration, teaching, and curating, but painting has remained always at the very heart of her practice. This comprehensive monograph covers two decades of production, from the late-1990s to the present. Valerie Smith’s text reveals Sillman’s uniquely time-based approach to painting, influenced and inflected as much by filmmakers and musicians and the processes of her other chosen disciplines as by strictly art-historical forebears. Sillman’s works perform an intensive cognitive and gestural interrogation of her chosen materials: discovering, undoing, and reforming trains of painterly thought, often over long periods of time and across large numbers of linked works. Sillman’s painting emerges as a radically expressive force: a pointedly self-reflexive practice that reformulates contemporary painting as an ever-evolving continuum and never simply a finished work.

Valerie Smith is an award-winning curator, who has worked extensively in New York and Europe. She also writes art criticism and teaches at Barnard College, New York.