"Sillman’s broken-up, magnified, and displaced shapes step into the breach of a world de-constituting itself as objective reality. They index not modernist shock or withdrawal but the slipperiness of a reality that is increasingly ungraspable, one in which the space between things is quickly evaporating. In that world, the relation between canvas and painter is as precarious as any other. Sillman consciously stops short of offering any resolution."
Executed with an polychromatic patchwork of geometric planes and arcs spanning the canvas, Mother 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)). Her confident broad forms suffuse the canvas with energy and movement, while organic arched strokes of yellow and green point us towards the sense of a landscape, arresting the viewer just at the point of cognition. Among the most consummate examples of Sillman’s signature mode, Mother 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.
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 work from the early 2010s directly engages the push-and-pull between the oscillating dominance of abstraction versus figuration, ultimately settling somewhere in the middle. 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).
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 Mother exists not only in conversation with her art historical predecessors, but also with the present moment. Test.mes nt to its importance within Sillman’s oeuvre, Mother was prominently featured in the Whitney Museum of Art’s 77th Biennial in March 2014. Other examples of Sillman’s work belong in esteemed international museum collects ions such as the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.; Moderna Museet, Stockholm and Saatchi collects ion, London. One of the most celebrated artists of her generation, Sillman is the steadfast champion of painting’s relevance in the contemporary era and her brilliantly saturated canvases evidence the power of painting when its rules are bent.
