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Amy Sillman
Amy Sillman’s first Italian solo show was inaugurated on November 7. On display are new works that the artist has created specifically to fill the three main exhibit rooms of Bologna’s Galleria Marabini. In many ways Sillman is a muse of the approximate. Her works approximate narrative, spiritual states, areas, bodies, and languages, blending the recognizable and the resolutely non-representative, the strange and wonderful with the wonderfully strange, to obtain powerful results on both a psychological and formal level. Pathos is the primary subject of Sillman’s works, which unfailingly draw on mythological sources and the artist’s personal imaginings, and which are peopled by human figures, by strange animals rendered in the style of cartoon characters, or by hybrid creatures that are the subjects of enigmatic narratives. The unlikely nature of certain images (eggs emerging from a woman’s body, for example) can make the way the work is structured seem implausible. In these pieces the perspective is extended beyond the parameters of the painting and the viewer can literally see the world from a different angle. It is this quality that guides the viewer through the infinite range of possibilities her work contains. Dense with color, Sillman’s luxuriant paintings aim to explore the full potential of the technique she employs. Juxtaposing opaque and transparent zones, applying thin layers of chalk on a brilliant blue, or mixing purple and pink paints with streaks of green, Sillman manages to wend her way along various routes—from the watery colors of French impressionism, distant memories of Indian mysticism, to vivid reds and bright oranges. The fluidity of Sillman’s allusions and working processes can also be extended to her way of seeing: when we look at her paintings everything is revealed very gradually, our intuition primarily guiding our interpretation of the shapes and narratives depicted. The elements in Sillman’s paintings embody a variety of genres, from the sexual and metamorphic, through mystical imagery, to love, the most profound of all, in which the contours of man and woman are all-pervading. Sillman lives and works in New York. She has had numerous solo shows and participated in group exhibitions in the most important American and European galleries—including Brent Sikkema and Casey Kaplan in New York, and Ghislaine Hussenot in Paris—and has gained wide scale recognition on the part of international critics.
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Amy Sillman - Invitation
2001
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