Last December, in an online lecture to students at the Cooper Union, Sillman laid out an incomplete list of first principles, among them negation, chance, humour and improvisation. For several years, she was co-chair of the painting department at Bard College, where she received her own MFA in 1995. Courtesy: the artist and Gladstone GalleryĪbove all, Sillman embraces the pleasure of process for its own sake: a concept she centres in her teaching. 2 Over the years, as she steadily amassed her own cult following, Sillman has maintained a studied agnosticism in her practice, following trails of wisdom across religion, literature and art history.Īmy Sillman, XL15, 2020, acrylic and ink on paper, 1.5 × 1 m. The curator Helen Molesworth has deemed Sillman’s approach to painting as exemplary of a virtuous ‘unknowability’ and describes this as emblematic of a feminist ethos in a historical lineage that includes Virginia Woolf, Jacqueline Rose and Judith Butler, one that counters the combination of ‘mastery and power’ that has defined art-historical cults of genius. She has developed a pragmatic philosophy of painting that mobilizes doubt, treating mark-making not as a grand testament to an artist’s skill but as an invitation for us to follow and think alongside her. ![]() Photograph: Calla Kesslerįor more than four decades – across painting, drawing, animation, zines and an increasing corpus of writing – Sillman has combined a dialectics of intimacy and awkwardness, self-deprecation and prowess, figuration and abstraction. When I ask why she’s drawn to the Torah, she replies that the texts are fitting for the present moment of isolation, ‘a crazy chronicle of people arguing, complaining, getting things wrong, haggling and being fucked up’. In these stories, lessons are continually being imparted and events occur one right after another, alternating between tragedy and comedy, salvation and punishment. Though she has Jewish roots, Sillman approaches her studies with secular enthusiasm, teasing out bathetic moments in scripture that have a decidedly humanist appeal. Specifically, the artist has been looking at the Five Books of Moses – or Torah – with their litany of travails, victories and epiphanies of a people exiled in search of a homeland. “An exuberant, massively heterogeneous, exhilarating bundle of texts, diagrams, drawings, that document, activate, and irritate.Amy Sillman has been studying the Bible. “Amy Sillman’s world view shines so beautifully throughout Faux Pas that it becomes a kind of illumination. This new, updated edition features additional texts-including a previously unpublished essay on drawing that complements Sillman’s views on color and shape-as well as new drawings from 2020-22. In Faux Pas, a collection of her most recent essays, alongside her cartoons and original drawings, art-as personal as it is political-is a practice that responds to today’s struggles. Her writings extend a practice that challenges traditions and theoretical frameworks with criticality and humor, and advocates subjectivity: she reevaluates Abstract Expressionism with a queer eye, explores the meanings of color and shape, and discusses in depth the work of other artists-from Delacroix (and Cézanne!) to Maria Lassnig to Carolee Schneemann to Laura Owens. ![]() ![]() An enhanced experience of the artist's witty, funny and overall amazing reflections on art practice and life.Ī key figure in the New York art scene, Amy Sillman is renowned for her singular approach to painting and drawing. * WOW ! * Very proud to annouce our third reprint of Amy Sillman's writings, now in an expanded edition: four new texts and many new drawings. Selected Writings and Drawings (Expanded Edition)
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