“My whole impetus in making art, making work, writing, drawing is to function as a kind of combination bricoleur, flaneur, voyeur, radish farmer, auto mechanic, and take parts, and with my labor, remake a strange new language.”
Executed with a palimpsestic logic of layered forms and geometric planes across a field of blazing orange, Junker 1 of 2009-10 succinctly distills Amy Sillman’s groundbreaking process-based enterprise: “My whole impetus in making art, making work, writing, drawing is…to take parts, and with my labor, remake a strange new language” (Amy Sillman quoted in Laurie Barron, “Amy Sillman Emancipates the Reputation of Abstraction,” Ocula, 28 October 2021 (online)). A scorching riot suffuses the canvas with energy and movement, while turbulent, mechanical strokes of blue, purple and black at once delineate and disrupt its pictorial infrastructure. Among the most consummate examples of Sillman’s signature mode, Junker I is situated within the precarious brink between abstraction and figuration, with its dialectical tension revealing itself as an undeniable byproduct of the artist’s process – one that has been critically lauded for radically privileging doubt and unknowability above canonical ideals of mastery and power, thus extending the storied legacy of Abstract Expressionism into new territory. Evincing its importance within Sillman’s oeuvre, Junker 1 was prominently featured in the artist’s first major museum exhibition, Amy Sillman: one lump or two at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston in 2013. Sillman’s work further belongs in such esteemed international museum collects ions as the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.; Moderna Museet, Stockholm and Saatchi collects ion, London, among many others. One of the most celebrated artists of her generation, Sillman is the steadfast champion of painting’s relevance in the contemporary era, invoking her brilliantly saturated canvases as test.mes nts to the power of painting when its rules are bent.
Born in Detroit in 1955 and raised in Chicago, Sillman now lives and works in Brooklyn. Though she first gained recognition for her witty text-based drawings, Sillman’s recent work directly engages the push-and-pull between the oscillating dominance of abstraction versus figuration, ultimately settling somewhere in the middle. The title of the present work, Junker 1, brings to mind a beloved, well-used car hinting at a certain rawness or reclaimed quality, suggesting that beneath the surface of the polished strokes lies a sense of salvage or repurposing. Inviting contemplation on the relationship between chaos and order, control and spontaneity, the painting itself unravels in the tensions inherent to the process of artistic creation. Welcoming chance and accident, Sillman is known for her process-based methodology, which not only explores the potential of erasure as an additive painterly gesture, but also constructs form in an undeniably architectural and mechanical mode. Indeed, Sillman has explained her practice as inhabiting the space between intuition and empiricism: “Each half sort of vexes the other. Half of my painting process is accident / chance / mistake / erasure / discovery (i.e., body!), and this is balanced by about 50 percent decisions / analysis / editing / conceptualizing / etc. (i.e. mind!). And this is where the ‘mood’ of painting really appeals to me, this crazy slippage between what we do and what we think.” (Amy Sillman in conversation with Fabiran Schöneich, in: Exh. Cat., Frankfurt, Portikus, Amy Sillman: the ALL-OVER, 2016, p. 47)
For Sillman, liminal spaces are sites of possibility. Fraught, tenuous, sticky or unsure, the in-between realms of planning and improvisation, representation and abstraction are the wellsprings of her painterly enterprise. Even when faced with the precarity of the COVID-19 pandemic, Sillman remained unwaveringly productive, producing canvas after canvas that reinvigorated the frenzied coloration of Paul Klee and Ernst Ludwig Kichner—two of her biggest inspirations—with confidence and freshness. Sillman, also a writer and curator, is a thoughtful inheritor of the history of art, despite her gripes with canonical valorizations of mastery and masculinity. From nineteenth-century landscape painting to Vincent van Gogh, the Abstract Expressionists to Philip Guston, Sillman is acutely aware of her contemporary footing, and Junker 1 exists not only in conversation with her art historical predecessors, but also with the present moment.
“Sillman’s strategy has been to deploy this gestural mode, but in such a way as to indicate a kind of hesitancy about its use. Each of her strokes reveals itself not as the final masterful decision but as just one more application on a surface already covered with other strokes, which you can see behind to the last one."
Born out of a process in which decision-making is enriched by happenstance, Junker 1 embodies an exuberant and poetic interaction of painterly gesture, geometric mark-making, corporeal allusion and psychological charge. As curator Mark Godfrey writes, “Sillman’s strategy has been to deploy this gestural mode, but in such a way as to indicate a kind of hesitancy about its use. Each of her strokes reveals itself not as the final masterful decision but as just one more application on a surface already covered with other strokes, which you can see behind to the last one" (Mark Godfrey, “Stat.mes nts of Intent: The Art of Jacqueline Humphries, Laura Owens, Amy Sillman, and Charline von Heyl,” Artforum, May 2014 (online)). Suspended within the layers of the present work, it is precisely this unknowability and elusiveness that sustains Sillman’s practice and allows her to awaken new potentialities in the threshold between abstract and figurative form.
