“And I am formal when I build an abstract painting – I’m looking at line, space, depth, transparency, scale, density, all of that. But it’s all attached to feeling – and thought.”
A my Sillman is a beloved New York-based contemporary artist whose vivacious canvases describe the artist’s individual and iconic style. Though her work draws upon legendary artists such as Willem de Kooning and Philip Guston, with the present work drawing parallels to Albert Oehlen and Richard Diebenkorn, Sillman’s language of abstraction is entirely her own. By merging a deep knowledge of the art historical canon with both figurative and abstract practices, Sillman has been able to produce important compositions throughout her nearly fifty-decade career that spellbound viewers with the many emotions they evoke. What the Axe Knows is one such painting, which combines oil and acrylic to create layers upon layers of feeling, color, and texture.
What the Axe Knows incorporates unsuspecting shades of what are usually complementary colors (red and green) to create a scene that is both familiar and completely foreign, inviting and repulsive. The interplay of lines of varying thickness and angles animate the canvas into a frenzy of highly personal emotions. Line is simply line and yet so much more, which typifies Sillman’s innovative approach to transforming the fundamentals of line, color, and texture into powerful abstract art that is constantly in flux. Unsurprisingly, Sillman’s ability to imbue paint with such life has placed her work and herself in a multitude of major museum exhibitions and written profiles.
