Lot Essay
‘[Sillman’s] colour, scale and line create unorthodox constellations that seem to spill out limbs, enmesh and fall apart in anarchic rhythm. Like a DJ sampling, she is cross-referencing as if she was a postmodern Fauve. Cézanne, Chagall, late Guston and Carroll Dunham are distilled in a lyrical remix hinting at landscapes and interiors derived from instant memory’
MAX HENRY
‘Colour is a primary tool for negation in my work – colours that block each other out or contradict each other, and are mixed in an archeologico-dialectic of continual destruction and reconstruction. My palette begins with everything I look at in the world: paintings, iPhone apps, cartoons, magazines, flowers, fashion, buildings, landscapes, books, movies’
AMY SILLMAN
Executed on an immersive scale, spanning almost two metres in height, Amy Sillman’s The New Land is a lyrical example of her abstract painterly language. Painted in 2005, it offers a cacophony of gestural and geometric fragments, rendered in an electric spectrum of green, blue, red, orange and pink. Hints of known realities quiver within its depths – flowers, geological terrains, sprawling landscapes – yet are continually negated by the artist’s deliberately fractured perspective. Splicing and recombining influences drawn from the history of abstraction, contemporary culture and the natural world, Sillman’s work is driven by a tactile, carnal approach to colour, in which the weight, density and character of each pigment is brought to bear upon its application. ‘Colour is a primary tool for negation in my work – colours that block each other out or contradict each other, and are mixed in an archeologico-dialectic of continual destruction and reconstruction’, she explains. ‘My palette begins with everything I look at in the world: paintings, iPhone apps, cartoons, magazines, flowers, fashion, buildings, landscapes, books, movies’ (A. Sillman, ‘On Color’, in E. Graw and E. Lajer-Burcharth (eds.), Painting beyond Itself: The Medium in the Postmedium Condition, New York 2016). Built intensively over long periods of time, Sillman’s works are repositories of physical and mental states, simultaneously dreamlike and curiously evocative. Rich in optical sensation, the present work was included in the group show Abstract America at the Saatchi Gallery, London, in 2008. ‘Like a DJ sampling’, wrote Max Henry in the exhibition catalogue, ‘[Sillman] is cross-referencing as if she was a postmodern Fauve. Cézanne, Chagall, late Guston and Carroll Dunham are distilled in a lyrical remix hinting at landscapes and interiors derived from instant memory’ (M. Henry, ‘The New Atlantis: Abstract America’, in Abstract America, exh. cat., Saatchi Gallery, London, 2008, p. 8).
MAX HENRY
‘Colour is a primary tool for negation in my work – colours that block each other out or contradict each other, and are mixed in an archeologico-dialectic of continual destruction and reconstruction. My palette begins with everything I look at in the world: paintings, iPhone apps, cartoons, magazines, flowers, fashion, buildings, landscapes, books, movies’
AMY SILLMAN
Executed on an immersive scale, spanning almost two metres in height, Amy Sillman’s The New Land is a lyrical example of her abstract painterly language. Painted in 2005, it offers a cacophony of gestural and geometric fragments, rendered in an electric spectrum of green, blue, red, orange and pink. Hints of known realities quiver within its depths – flowers, geological terrains, sprawling landscapes – yet are continually negated by the artist’s deliberately fractured perspective. Splicing and recombining influences drawn from the history of abstraction, contemporary culture and the natural world, Sillman’s work is driven by a tactile, carnal approach to colour, in which the weight, density and character of each pigment is brought to bear upon its application. ‘Colour is a primary tool for negation in my work – colours that block each other out or contradict each other, and are mixed in an archeologico-dialectic of continual destruction and reconstruction’, she explains. ‘My palette begins with everything I look at in the world: paintings, iPhone apps, cartoons, magazines, flowers, fashion, buildings, landscapes, books, movies’ (A. Sillman, ‘On Color’, in E. Graw and E. Lajer-Burcharth (eds.), Painting beyond Itself: The Medium in the Postmedium Condition, New York 2016). Built intensively over long periods of time, Sillman’s works are repositories of physical and mental states, simultaneously dreamlike and curiously evocative. Rich in optical sensation, the present work was included in the group show Abstract America at the Saatchi Gallery, London, in 2008. ‘Like a DJ sampling’, wrote Max Henry in the exhibition catalogue, ‘[Sillman] is cross-referencing as if she was a postmodern Fauve. Cézanne, Chagall, late Guston and Carroll Dunham are distilled in a lyrical remix hinting at landscapes and interiors derived from instant memory’ (M. Henry, ‘The New Atlantis: Abstract America’, in Abstract America, exh. cat., Saatchi Gallery, London, 2008, p. 8).