Amy Sillman

The three works Clown, Harpie and Minotaur are among the artist’s most recent works and were created for the exhibition during 2023 and 2024. For Sillman, the process of creation is at the forefront in her paintings just as it is in her serial drawings. She continually revises her works, letting the process itself guide her. The works have been repeatedly painted over or the paint removed and revised. Just as the work has continually changed, the title was likewise persistently adapted. While earlier works permitted figures to be recognized or sensed, the new works, despite their sometimes mythological titles, seem more like abstract compositions in which background and foreground dissolve in favor of a rich variety of layers.

Amy Sillman continually renegotiates the notions of and approaches to painting, encouraging us, as viewers, to look at her works with the same open mind. She represents the radical conviction that painting can only be understood in thinking from its process of creation. Such a conceptualization invites us to view the paintings not with the objective of understanding them, but with an attentive eye and interest in the practice of painting itself, and in doing so discover new, unexpected interrelationships.