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Lot Essay
Painted in 2013, the year of Amy Sillman’s first museum survey at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston, the present work is a dazzling example of her witty, playful practice. Spanning nearly two metres in height, it offers a cacophony of shape and colour. Geometric slabs of red, orange and blue combine with textural, translucent sweeps of violet, peach and spectral white. Different shades of green—forest, olive, emerald and lime—punctuate the surface. The work exemplifies Sillman’s hybrid painterly world: one in which colours are chosen for their personalities, and forms choreographed like characters in a play. Here, they spar against one another, echoing, contradicting and overlapping like a noisy dinner-table conversation.
Sillman belongs to a generation of artists—among them Charline von Heyl, Jacqueline Humphries and Laura Owens—who reinvigorated abstraction for the twenty-first century. Her works have received widespread critical acclaim in recent years, with her inclusion in the 2022 Venice Biennale and a major 2024-2025 touring exhibition beginning at the Kunstmuseum Bern. Sillman’s paintings form part of a rich multi-media practice that includes drawing, animation and zines. A talented writer as well as an artist, she understands paint like people, describing her canvases as alter-egos. Her works are filled with vividly human elements: humour, confrontation, restless quips and sardonic asides. In the present painting, writes Paige Bradley, ‘the quickly laid colours sit on the canvas with a liveliness like that of a runner bouncing on the balls of their feet, as if they might pick up and zoom off at any moment’ (P. Bradley, ‘Amy Sillman: The Labour of Painting’, The White Review, March 2014).
Sillman had originally read Japanese at university, following a trip to the country after high school. While studying calligraphy, a drawing class proved revelatory, eventually prompting her to change course. Her works, nonetheless, retain a certain calligraphic impulse, her lines and forms straining with the urge to communicate. Sillman, much like Howard Hodgkin, was also fascinated by the art and culture of India: she spent time there during the 1980s and mounted her first ever solo exhibition in Ahmedabad. Back home, the artist brought these influences to bear upon a practice that wrestled with the legacies of the Western canon, expunging the ghosts of Abstract Expressionism and colour theory and stirring up references to Henri Matisse, Richard Diebenkorn, Philip Guston, Helen Frankenthaler and Joan Mitchell. Though rife with spontaneity and movement, works such as the present emerge slowly, with Sillman adjusting and editing her canvas until the process yields a moment of surprise. The results seem to speak their own language, condensing speech, thought and gesture into captivating visual dramas.
Sillman belongs to a generation of artists—among them Charline von Heyl, Jacqueline Humphries and Laura Owens—who reinvigorated abstraction for the twenty-first century. Her works have received widespread critical acclaim in recent years, with her inclusion in the 2022 Venice Biennale and a major 2024-2025 touring exhibition beginning at the Kunstmuseum Bern. Sillman’s paintings form part of a rich multi-media practice that includes drawing, animation and zines. A talented writer as well as an artist, she understands paint like people, describing her canvases as alter-egos. Her works are filled with vividly human elements: humour, confrontation, restless quips and sardonic asides. In the present painting, writes Paige Bradley, ‘the quickly laid colours sit on the canvas with a liveliness like that of a runner bouncing on the balls of their feet, as if they might pick up and zoom off at any moment’ (P. Bradley, ‘Amy Sillman: The Labour of Painting’, The White Review, March 2014).
Sillman had originally read Japanese at university, following a trip to the country after high school. While studying calligraphy, a drawing class proved revelatory, eventually prompting her to change course. Her works, nonetheless, retain a certain calligraphic impulse, her lines and forms straining with the urge to communicate. Sillman, much like Howard Hodgkin, was also fascinated by the art and culture of India: she spent time there during the 1980s and mounted her first ever solo exhibition in Ahmedabad. Back home, the artist brought these influences to bear upon a practice that wrestled with the legacies of the Western canon, expunging the ghosts of Abstract Expressionism and colour theory and stirring up references to Henri Matisse, Richard Diebenkorn, Philip Guston, Helen Frankenthaler and Joan Mitchell. Though rife with spontaneity and movement, works such as the present emerge slowly, with Sillman adjusting and editing her canvas until the process yields a moment of surprise. The results seem to speak their own language, condensing speech, thought and gesture into captivating visual dramas.