Listen to me carefully, you bunch of snobs, it is time to talk about Amy Sillman, this painter whose works are like delicious slaps to pictorial conventions, high-wire acts where abstraction and figuration simultaneously embrace and bite each other.
Born in 1955 in Detroit and raised in Chicago, Sillman is that New Yorker by adoption who carries within her all the roughness of the Midwest and the bubbling sophistication of Manhattan. It is no coincidence that she waited until well into her forties to be recognized by an art world too busy chasing poorly lit video installations or giant canvases painted by men with oversized egos.
Sillman’s painting is a splendidly awkward choreography, a tango between form and formlessness. Look at “Elephant in the Room” (2006) or more recently her works presented at the Gladstone Gallery in 2020: at first glance, you might think of a joyful chromatic delirium, but think again. What Sillman achieves is a kind of modern dance where every pictorial gesture is both controlled and spontaneous, calculated and visceral.
Dance, the art of the body par excellence, offers us a privileged key to understanding Sillman’s work. As Valéry so rightly wrote: “Dance is the pure act of metamorphoses” [1]. This reflection could just as well be applied to Sillman’s painting, which constantly transforms, never frozen, always in motion. Her brushstrokes resemble the movements of a Pina Bausch choreography: apparently chaotic but following an implacable internal logic.
The choreographer Mary Wigman, a major figure of German expressionist dance, spoke of “the tension between order and chaos, between structure and freedom” [2]. This tension inhabits every square inch of Sillman’s canvases. Her creative process is like a danced improvisation, where the precarious balance between structure and abandon constitutes the very essence of the work.
In her “Landline” series exhibited at Camden Arts Centre in 2018, Sillman proposes a visual sequence akin to the movement studies of a choreographer. Her calligraphic lines trace trajectories in the pictorial space that evoke Rudolf Laban’s choreographic notations. The space thus becomes a territory both mental and physical, where forms perform a complex ballet.
Sillman understands that painting, like dance, is an art of time. Her works record the time spent creating them, each layer bearing witness to a specific moment, a decision, a hesitation, a change of intention. As dance theorist Laurence Louppe writes: “In dance, the instant does not fade in favor of the next, it transforms into it” [3]. Similarly, previous traces in Sillman’s paintings never completely disappear; they are transformed, reinvented, reincorporated into a new configuration.
If dance helps us grasp the bodily and temporal dimension of Sillman’s work, psychoanalysis allows us to explore its psychic depths. For these canvases are much more than pretty arrangements of colors and shapes; they are visual manifestations of psychic tensions, ambivalences, and contradictory desires.
In an article for Texte Zur Kunst in 2011, Sillman writes: “I am interested in abstraction as a form of thinking that can incorporate and contain opposing forces” [4]. This idea echoes Melanie Klein’s theories on the depressive position, that psychic state in which the individual manages to integrate the contradictory aspects of her experience, the good and the bad, love and hate, into a complex but coherent whole [5].
Sillman’s paintings, with their forms that seem to simultaneously attract and repel each other, perfectly embody this Kleinian tension. In “Psychology Today” (2006), for example, a yellow-green cubic structure is disrupted by crayon red marks, while incongruous legs hang from the bottom of the canvas. It is as if we are witnessing the struggle between the pleasure principle and the reality principle, between the id and the superego, played out on the stage of the canvas.
Julia Kristeva, in her analysis of abjection, speaks of this murky zone between subject and object, this porous border where identity is constantly threatened and reaffirmed [6]. Sillman’s paintings precisely inhabit this liminal space. Her abstract forms often evoke bodily fragments, a breast, an arm, a foot, without ever settling into literal representation. They remain in this disturbing in-between that characterizes the abject according to Kristeva.
This psychoanalytic dimension is particularly evident in her drawings of couples, where she sketched her friends during moments of domestic intimacy. These works, which she later transposed into abstract compositions, reveal how desire and identification traverse her work. Observing these couples, Sillman places herself in the position of the excluded third, the witness who both participates and remains outside the intimate scene, the classic position of the therapist in analytic treatment.
But Sillman is no fool about psychoanalysis either. She uses it as a tool among others, without ever fully submitting to it. As she said during a conference: “I distrust any theory that claims to explain everything” [7]. Her biting humor and capacity for self-mockery are bulwarks against any dogmatic interpretation of her work.
Indeed, these paintings are funny, subtle humor, sometimes biting, but undeniable. Take her zines, those limited edition publications she has regularly produced since 2009. In “The O-G,” she includes cartoons, satirical seating plans for dinner parties, essays, and sketches revealing a sharp and caustic mind. Her approach is reminiscent of Rabelais, using humor as a weapon against any form of authority and certainty.
The titles of her works, “Me and Ugly Mountain,” “Psychology Today,” “The Elephant in the Room,” testify to this ironic spirit. They function as knowing winks to the viewer, inviting them not to take too seriously what might otherwise seem austere or hermetic.
Sillman shares with Philip Guston the ability to infuse humor into abstraction, to humanize what might remain cold and distant. As Mikhail Bakhtin wrote about the carnivalesque, humor allows “the temporary abolition of all hierarchical relations, privileges, rules, and taboos” [8]. In an often rigid and hierarchical art world, Sillman’s painting acts as a temporary zone of autonomy where the usual rules are suspended.
This humorous dimension is particularly evident in her animations, which she began creating on her iPhone in 2009. These little films, where shapes continuously transform, are like visual jokes unfolding over time. They recall old cartoons, those of the Fleischer brothers or Tex Avery, where bodies are constantly distorted, stretched, compressed, without ever losing their essential vitality.
But Sillman’s humor is never gratuitous. It serves to address serious subjects, body, desire, anxiety, politics, in an oblique but effective way. As Freud said, humor is a sophisticated defense mechanism that allows us to face anxiety [9]. Sillman’s paintings are funny precisely because they are profound, because they touch on uncomfortable truths about our condition.
What makes Amy Sillman’s work so vital is that she reinvents abstract painting for our troubled era. At a time when this medium has been declared dead many times, when personal expression is often viewed with suspicion, when art is increasingly assimilated to merchandise or entertainment, Sillman persists in creating works that demand real engagement.
Her work is politically engaged, not by illustrating causes or proclaiming slogans, but by embodying a form of resistance through her very practice. As critic Helen Molesworth noted, Sillman’s painting offers a feminist critique of the gaze, shifting attention from the structure of representation to the feelings that arise when one becomes aware of being looked at [10].
Sillman rejects ease, immediacy, quick consumption. Her works reveal themselves slowly, demand time, invite active contemplation rather than passive recognition. In a world saturated with ephemeral digital images, her paintings affirm the value of physical experience, materiality, presence.
As she herself said: “I deeply believe in the politics of improvisation. In its best aspects, it concerns contingency, emotions. Walking on a wire” [11]. This tightrope walker metaphor perfectly captures what makes her art great: constant risk, precarious balance, assumed vulnerability.
Sillman’s recent works, with their slightly off-kilter compositions evoking a sense of imbalance, shifting ground, reflect our uncertain times. They are like seismographs recording the tremors of our world. Faced with COVID, political and climate crises, her paintings offer us not a refuge, but a space where these anxieties can be expressed, explored, perhaps even temporarily tamed.
Amy Sillman reminds us that painting is not just an object to contemplate but an event to live, a meeting to risk, a conversation to pursue. In a world that values certainty and mastery, she defends the right to doubt, hesitation, productive ambivalence. And that is precisely what we need today.
- Valéry, Paul. Philosophy of Dance, Gallimard, Paris, 1957.
- Wigman, Mary. The Language of Dance, Wesleyan University Press, Middletown, 1966.
- Louppe, Laurence. Poetics of Contemporary Dance, Contredanse, Brussels, 2000.
- Sillman, Amy. “Affirmative Reaction”, Texte Zur Kunst, December 2011.
- Klein, Melanie. Love, Guilt and Reparation, The Hogarth Press, London, 1975.
- Kristeva, Julia. Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, Seuil, Paris, 1980.
- Sillman, Amy. Lecture at Städelschule, Frankfurt, 2012.
- Bakhtin, Mikhail. The Work of François Rabelais and Popular Culture in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, Gallimard, Paris, 1970.
- Freud, Sigmund. Wit and Its Relation to the Unconscious, Gallimard, Paris, 1988.
- Molesworth, Helen. “Amy Sillman: Look, Touch, Embrace,” in One Lump or Two, Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston, 2013.
- Sillman, Amy. Interview with Tausif Noor, Frieze, March 2, 2021.
