Amy Sillman: one lump or two

Amy Sillman: one lump or two—the artist’s first museum survey—follows her development as an artist from the mid-1990s to the present, as her work moved from drawing to painting to moving images, and from figuration to abstraction. Featured are more than 90 works, including drawings, paintings, ‘zines (which she calls “a chance to present one’s own epiphanies”), and the artist’s recent forays into animated film.

Sillman’s early works, characterized by cartoon lines and a riot of pastel and acid hues, move effortlessly from figure to landscape, playfully and often humorously exploring problems of physical and emotional scale with observations that are both wry and revealing.

In the mid-2000s, Sillman took a different track as she started to draw couples from life in intimate pencil, ink, and gouache drawings that she then translated from memory into paintings with bold brushstrokes and abstract blocks of rich color. These paintings, with their angular forms and unexpected palettes, proved to be a reinvigorated form of 21st-century abstract expressionism.

As artists started to question painting’s role in an age of reproduction and mass media, many looked to photography. Sillman turned instead to the diagram, injecting into her lush, abstract fields of color the sort of stringent line so often used to communicate complex information. Most recently, Sillman has questioned whether painting needs paint at all, making drawings on her iPhone that she transforms into movies that bring back the neurotic figures of her early images while delving further into the current roles of abstraction, color, and the diagram.

Amy Sillman: one lump or two was organized by Helen Molesworth, Barbara Lee Chief Curator, and was subsequently on view at the Aspen Art Museum from February 14, 2014–May 18, 2014.

Learn more at ICA/Boston.