Amongst the most distinctive voices in contemporary painting, Amy Sillman exhibited through all the galleries for her first institutional exhibition in the UK.
Over the last three decades, she has interrogated the language and practice of painting, re-evaluating its history and extending its reach into emergent mechanical and digital processes. Working in New York, Sillman’s wayward form of abstraction has pushed defiantly at the process-oriented approaches typically associated with the traditions of post-war painting, infusing her work with a modern sensibility, critical self-reflexivity and humour.
Many of Sillman’s works undergo prolonged periods of gestation during which they are reworked, layered, washed over, scraped back, reoriented, sanded and embellished; ultimately moved from one state to another. This physical and emotional process is inscribed in the accretions of the work’s rendered surfaces; an energy of antagonism resides in forms that remain somehow in flux, feelings that don’t resolve, signs that don’t signify and materials that struggle between construction and deconstruction.
Sillman’s entire back catalogue of self-published zines were available for visitors to take away, alongside a new issue created especially for Camden Art Centre. In a new site-specific installation, Sillman was working in a bold new format for the very first time, creating a sequence of large double-sided works on paper that combine print, drawing and painting. Landline explored the depth and scope of Sillman’s exuberant practice ranging from the political and social to the emotional and psychological in an extraordinary body of work that encompasses gestural drawing, painting, silkscreen print processes, video animation and zines.
