Description
Book SynopsisA prolifically creative artistic polymath, American artist Amy Sillman (b.1955) works in drawing, zines, iPhone videos, installation, collaboration, teaching and curating, but painting has remained always at the very heart of her practice. This comprehensive monograph covers two decades of production, from the late-1990s to the present.
Valerie Smith’s text reveals Sillman’s uniquely time-based approach to painting, influenced and inflected as much by filmmakers and musicians and the processes of her other chosen disciplines as by strictly art-historical forebears. Sillman’s works perform an intensive cognitive and gestural interrogation of her chosen materials: discovering, undoing and reforming trains of painterly thought, often over long periods of time and across large numbers of linked works.
Sillman’s painting emerges as a radically expressive force; a pointedly self-reflexive practice that reformulates contemporary painting as an ever-evolving continuum and never simply a finished work.
Trade Review‘Amy Sillman is one of the most important, inventive, and intelligent painters of our time. This book offers a cogent yet probing introduction to her life and work. If you’re already a fan, you’ll learn more. If you don’t know her work yet, welcome to its rigorous, rabble-rousing, often ravishing ride.’ - Maggie Nelson
‘Amy Sillman is among a handful of painters whose work is essential for our time. Her paintings are formally astute, witty, anecdotal, and deeply felt. Valerie Smith has done an excellent job of documenting Sillman’s circuitous evolution, focusing our attention on the ways in which the artist’s multi-faceted interests are embedded in her paintings.’ – David Salle
