BRIDGEHAMPTON, NY.- Dia Art Foundation is presenting Amy Sillman: Alternate Side (Permutations #1–32), a yearlong exhibition at Dia Bridgehampton. This multifaceted installation features a newly commissioned, site-specific work painted and screenprinted directly onto the gallery walls, superimposed with a unique series of framed screenprints created during Sillman’s 2024–25 residency at Two Palms, a New York print studio. Alternate Side (Permutations #1–32) demonstrates Sillman’s ability to toggle back and forth between media as well as between improvisational and systematic approaches, abstraction and legibility. Through this hybrid process, she layers, distributes, and excavates to produce uncanny perspectival shifts among flatness, volume, color, and shape.

“Amy Sillman’s transformation of the gallery into a space of site-responsive experimentation continues Dia’s tradition of supporting artists who challenge conventions of medium specificity and exhibition making. By treating the gallery as both site and surface, Sillman reimagines the possibilities of drawing and printmaking at an architectural scale, creating a work that is at once rigorous, playful, and deeply attuned to place,” said Jessica Morgan, Dia’s Nathalie de Gunzburg Director.

Since the 1990s, Sillman has developed a prolific, category-defying body of work that includes paintings, zines, animations, and prints, with a visual vocabulary that moves fluidly between figuration and abstraction. Built in iterative layers, her compositions accumulate over time through gestures of erasure, revision, and improvisation. This process-driven approach informs both the formal complexity of her individual works and the structure of her exhibitions, which have recently begun to unfold across walls like pages, emphasizing spatial and temporal relationships.

At Dia Bridgehampton, Sillman treats the architecture of the ground-floor gallery as a print in and of itself, reflecting her long-standing interest in the medium as both a method and a methodology. The complementary suite of monotypes, printed on surplus handmade paper from the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, employ a restricted lexicon of forms similar to those used in the wall painting; each print balances repetition and variation, structure and chance, producing what Sillman has called “a language of form.” Together, these works question traditional notions of seriality and reproducibility, emphasizing the singular and embodied aspects of printmaking.

The presentation also draws inspiration from the chromatic light of Dan Flavin’s permanent installation in the upstairs gallery, as well as the stained-glass window found at its back, with Sillman’s careful attention to the natural light animating the space and her engagement with the ground-floor gallery’s windows. Viewers’ perception of the installation alters over the course of the day and throughout the seasons, rendering the exhibition as a whole “unfixed,” an infinite series of permutations.

“Sillman has described drawing as offering the kind of clarity found in the filament of a light bulb, the marks immediate, exposed, and luminous. It is a fitting metaphor for Dia Bridgehampton, which hosts a permanent installation of Dan Flavin’s fluorescent-light sculptures and has long fostered unexpected connections across media. Flavin originally envisioned the space including a print studio—a press still sits in its back rooms—and Dia has presented here exhibitions by artists not traditionally associated with the institution, including Keith Haring and Alice Neel. Alternate Side (Permutations #1–32) builds on this legacy, extending Dia’s ongoing engagement with groundbreaking painters that refuse the constraints of the medium, in keeping with the experimental spirit of Minimal and Conceptual art,” said Jordan Carter, curator and co–department head.

Dia’s permanent installation of Flavin’s nine sculptures in fluorescent light (1963–81) is also on view on the second floor. 

Amy Sillman: Alternate Side (Permutations #1–32) is curated by Jordan Carter, curator and co–department head, with Emily Markert, curatorial associate.

Amy Sillman was born in Detroit in 1955. She is renowned for her painting-based multidisciplinary work, encompassing drawing, printmaking, animation, writing, and site-specific projects, and infusing abstraction with humor, formal and conceptual questions, and a rigorous physicality. Sillman has presented her work at institutions such as the Art Institute of Chicago; Camden Art Centre, London; the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Portikus, Frankfurt; and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. Recent exhibitions include the Venice Biennale: The Milk of Dreams (2022) and Amy Sillman: Oh, Clock!, a solo show alongside a curatorial project with the museums’ collections, at Kunstmuseum Bern, Switzerland (2024–25), and Ludwig Forum, Aachen, Germany (2025). In 2019, she curated The Shape of Shape as part as the Artist’s Choice series at the Museum of Modern Art, New York. Sillman also regularly publishes her writing on art; her book Faux Pas: Selected Writings and Drawings, published by After 8 Books in 2020, is now in its fourth printing. A long-time educator, Sillman was the co-chair of the MFA Painting program at Bard College, Annandale-On-Hudson, New York, from 1997 to 2013, and a professor at the Städelschule, Frankfurt, from 2015 to 2019. She lives in New York.