Amy Sillman: Rock Paper Scissors

It’s all fun and games. It’s elbows out. This and that. Take no prisoners. Us versus them. The good, the bad and the ugly. You win some, you lose some. Rock, paper, scissors.

Amy Sillman’s artwork is a manifestation of struggle—she enacts and investigates the friction between materials and forms. So it’s pattern versus gesture, beautiful versus ugly, drawing versus painting, round versus straight, chromatic versus organic, figure versus ground, legible versus illegible, adding versus removing, breaking versus restoring.  And all of it with feeling. A sense of the strange pleasure in persistence is palpable. A string of (somewhat trite) one-liners seems apt to begin to write about Amy Sillman’s practice, and the paintings and drawings she’s exhibiting in Rock Paper Scissors at Capitain Petzel, in part because the prospect of filtering these works into words feels perilously reductive, and the truism is at least emphatically so. On the other hand, perhaps they might introduce the sense of ineluctable truth—a kind of essential insight—that imbues Sillman’s painting. Encountering her work, I’m often confronted with the overwhelming realization, this is what it’s like to be a body in the world! This is what it’s like to be a person! Because it’s basically a jostle that’s awkward and frustrating and difficult and brimming with unexpected delight and fragile joy.

- Camila McHugh (Read full text here)                                                                                                       

Amy Sillman 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.