Born 1955 in Detroit, MI
Lives and works in New York
Amy Sillman’s distinctive artistic practice operates at the juncture between the abstract and the figurative. Her large-scale, gestural oil paintings as well as her finer drawings are layered and complex reflections on themes such as physicality, language and interrelativity, often with a humorous and cartoonish effect. She paints with dynamic gestures that convey a sense of movement and flux, while playfully engaging with form, color, shapes and layers yielding unexpected results. Sillman has become one of the most influential figures of 21st century painting, reinvigorating a new form of abstract expressionism as she moves across mediums seamlessly, integrating elements such as collage, drawing and printmaking into the same practice.
Sillman considers drawing to be the point of departure for all her work. She however explores more gestural modes of production in her inkjet-printed and silkscreened canvases, zines and also more recently in her animated iPhone videos, in which she brings her digitally drawn figures to life, as a reflection of her preferred media of painting and drawing and their respective boundaries.
Sillman participated in the 59th Biennale di Venezia. She has had solo exhibitions at many major institutions, namely at the Arts Club of Chicago (2019); The Camden Arts Center, London (2018); Kunsthaus Bregenz (2015), as well as group shows at Parrish Art Museum, Water Mill, New York (2021); Neues Museum, Nuremberg (2020); the Lenbachhaus, Munich (2018); Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (2016); Tate Modern, London (2015) and MoMA, New York (2015). Her work was included in the 2014 Whitney Biennial and can be found in the permanent collections of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, the Art Institute of Chicago, MoMA, the Whitney Museum of American Art and the Brooklyn Museum among others. She has won numerous prizes and been awarded fellowships, including the Guggenheim Fellowship in 2004 and a First Award from the Brooklyn Museum’s Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art. Sillman also teaches the MFA Program at Bard College. In 2019, the Silman curated an Artist’s Choice show at the MoMA entitled The Shape of Shape.