Amy Sillman

Sillman frequently documents her working process with her iPhone. For Temporary Object, she sorted all the snapshots from a specific period chronologically, producing black-and-white diagrams from them. She printed the results on aluminum panels and conceived a custom shelf structure for the works’ presentation.

Sillman employs screen printing as a foundation, functioning in a similar manner to an X-ray, to reveal the layers concealed in her painting. For Sillman, an X-ray is a means of determining what is wrong with the body when it is sick, an analogy she applies to her art. She is interested in what went wrong in the image, rather than just looking at the upper, acceptable or successful layer. The UV-printed aluminum panels appear simultaneously to be printed, painted, drawn, and object-like.

Inspired by Ferreira Gullar’s 1959 essay Theory of the Non-Object, Amy Sillman produced not a “non-object” but rather a Temporary Object for her 2023 solo exhibition in Sao Paulo.