b. 1955
Amy Sillman is an influential contemporary American painter whose practice conflates the abstract and the figurative into large-scale, gestural oil paintings. Born in 1955 in Detroit, MI, Sillman received her BFA from the School of Visual Arts in New York and her MFA from Bard College in Annandale-on-Hudson. “Painting is a physical thinking process to continue an interior dialogue,” she has said, “a way to engage in a kind of internal discourse, or sub-linguistic mumbling.” Her process-based work, suffused with humor and conceptual exploration, employs vibrant color and intense layering and drawing, and seeks intensity rather than beauty. In addition to her painting practice, Sillman also produces zines and iPad animations, and writes on the work of other artists. The artist has exhibited widely, and her work is included in numerous museum collections in the US and Europe. Her first museum survey, “one lump or two,” curated by Helen Molesworth, opened in 2013 at the Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston. Sillman is based in New York.
