NEW YORK, NY.- David Zwirner announced the representation of New York–based artist Amy Sillman. Sillman’s first exhibition with the gallery will be in New York in 2027.
Amy Sillman is widely recognized as one of the most significant painters of her generation. Since the early 1990s, she has developed a multidisciplinary practice that spans painting, drawing, digital animation, printmaking, large-scale installations, and critical writing. Sillman’s process-oriented work navigates the contested terrains between images and words, line and shape, object and site, meaning and feeling.
The artist’s decisive compositions emerge from accumulated layers of painting, erasure, and revision in a process that is at once slow and immediate, deliberate and impulsive, and ultimately considers notions of time. Engaging deeply with the history of painting, Sillman draws from a wide range of high and low art influences and precedents—from gestural to hard-edge painting, abstract expressionism to minimalist seriality—excavating and remaking them in an expansive practice that speaks to the present. The artist also deploys diverse modes of inquiry from film, music, and philosophy, using humor, improvisation, and ambiguity as radical strategies for dismantling hierarchies and constructing new meaning.
As Barry Schwabsky writes: “If painting is really drawing [in Sillman’s work], then her drawing is really animation, and her animation is really painting, so that the distinct aspects of her work are in fact stages in a single process—which I am going to insist on calling painting. The practice exposes an iterative process in which adding is also effacing, and in which unnameable shapes simply represent feelings more unfathomable than those that can be summed up in, say, a depiction of legs and feet.”1
David Zwirner states, “I love Amy Sillman's work, and I’m so honored that she has decided to join the gallery. Her artmaking is endlessly intelligent, as it operates on so many levels simultaneously. Amy treats painting as a form of thinking itself, where every mark contains both construction and demolition, certainty and doubt. She has this remarkable ability to mine the entire history of the medium in the process. Her practice also encompasses much more than painting. Seeing Amy’s multidisciplinary approach in full action in the Ludwig Forum in Aachen last year was a true revelation. There, alongside a powerful survey of her work, Amy recontextualized a rather static and peculiar museum collection. Using the museum’s walls as a support for her painterly gesamtkunstwerk, Amy managed to reframe the art of her colleagues with a deep sense of humanity and humor, creating an environment that was entirely novel and contemporary. In her wide-ranging practice she is completely unafraid to take risks, and in the process prompts us—generously, humorously, rigorously—to see things in new ways. I couldn’t be more excited to be part of the next chapter of Amy’s extraordinary career.”
[1] Barry Schwabsky, "Amy Sillman," Artforum [vol. 63 no. 1]. September 2024 (accessed online).
