Amy Sillman

The large-scale installation Frieze for Venice was created, at the invitation of curator Cecilia Alemani, for The Milk of Dreams exhibition at the Venice Biennale 2022, and was developed specifically for a large space in the Arsenale. The almost 90 drawings and prints extend around the entire walls of the exhibition space. In the works, Sillman has layered acrylic paint, ink, and screen printing on paper to create differing motifs and forms. The lower, larger works are presented vertically, in the tradition of portraits, while the upper row of smaller works unfolds horizontally, in a manner similar to landscapes.

The work functions like a musical score, a calendar, or clock – a sequence of works extending around the space, creating pauses and intervals, without the viewer knowing either where the sequence begins or ends. The work’s presentation is integral to the artistic concept. As Sillman explains: “I have always been drawn to that kind of comic strip format. There is also the fact that I was reading ancient texts around that time and thinking about antiquity and how time is circular in earlier civilizations. It is based on, for example, the seasons, and so it goes around and around and around, and it repeats and repeats. And obviously, there is also this kind of filmic sense of a projector and how its mechanism goes around. Experimental film and video traditions from the 1960s/1970s were always crucial to me.”

Sillman’s work is informed by her belief that “every painting is layered upon all the other paintings ever made.” The frieze itself contains numerous references to such artists as Pablo Picasso and Henri Matisse, as well as to Alma Thomas, Philip Guston, and Robert Motherwell. Nevertheless, art historians have noted that the handwriting of the entire frieze in Venice appears unmistakably “Sillmanesque,” “as does the color palette with its almost shocking embrace of lavender and purple, tricky hues that have been underexplored in modernist painting. She stays with that lavender, pushing it around, besmirching it, pairing it with yellow and green to draw out its earthiness. The sheer durational quality of her play with purple feels stubbornly investigatory.”