Amy Sillman @ Gladstone 64, New York - "Mostly Drawing" Exhibition

Amy Sillman: Mostly Drawing
Gladstone 64, New York
January 26 – March 3, 2018

Gladstone 64 presents Mostly Drawing, an exhibition of new works by AMY SILLMAN. This show marks the artist’s first exhibition with Gladstone Gallery.

As the show’s title self-referentially indicates, this exhibition is comprised primarily of works on paper incorporating silkscreened, painted, and drawn elements that continue Amy Sillman’s decades-long examination into the ideological underpinnings of the term Drawing itself. In each work, the artist employs formal dualities from the art historical canon – namely, narration versus abstraction, color versus line, flat versus recessive space, and painting versus drawing – not as a means to a conceptual end, but rather as a method to push these painterly concerns to their extremes. The works on view therefore defy easy categorization, as each one appears to vacillate between overt abstraction and coded figuration, between traditional painting and comic illustration. Yet this simultaneous presentation of dissimilar components does not imply incompatibility. The heterogeneity evident in every composition invites the viewer to resist the pictorial resolutions that one seeks in finished artworks, and instead revel in the liminal space that Sillman creates using her own visual language.

This indulgence in multeity evolves from the artist’s process. Refuting the classic dichotomy of fast drawings and slow paintings, Amy Sillman’s works do not exist within a fixed chronology of creation. Some compositions are made in a day, others in a week, and some over the course of months. What is of primary concern to Sillman is the examination of the hierarchy between media that seemingly exists in artmaking. By refusing to acknowledge any media-specific pecking order within each picture – Are these drawings? Prints? Paintings? Or none of the above? – the artist generates works that encourage an interrogation of art production that is both ethical in nature and engaging in situ.

In relation to their installation at Gladstone 64, Sillman’s excited, overflowing compositions also play with the comfort connoted by the townhouse setting of the gallery. The dialogue between work and location, while seemingly jarring, invites a sense of unease to coexist with the traditional prettiness of modernist architecture. Through this gesture, the artist creates a setting wherein the sensation of comfortlessness is inverted to seem not only allowable, but also desirable.

Two events celebrating the recent publication of Amy Sillman: The ALL-OVER (Dancing Foxes Press, Mousse and Portikus; 2017) will be held in conjunction with Mostly Drawing: the first, a book signing at Gladstone 64, on January 27 from 3-5pm; the second, a film screening and signing at Metrograph on March 4.

Amy Sillman: The ALL-OVER

Edited by Karen Kelly, Fabian Schöneich, and Barbara Schroeder

Texts by Yve-Alain Bois and Manuela Ammer, interview by Fabian Schöneich

Design by Ronnie Fueglister

164 pages, 95 illustrations

Copublished by Dancing Foxes Press, Mousse Publishing, Portikus

Amy Sillman was born in 1955 in Detroit, Michigan, and currently lives and works in New York. Since 2015, she has been professor of painting at the Städelschule in Frankfurt am Main. Sillman’s work has been the subject of numerous solo exhibitions at institutions including: Albright Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, New York; Drawing Center, New York; Portikus, Frankfurt am Main, Germany; Kunsthaus Bregenz, Austria; and The Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, D.C. Beginning at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston in 2014, Sillman’s solo exhibition, "one lump or two," traveled to the Aspen Art Museum in Colorado and the Center for Curatorial Studies at Bard College, New York. Her works are held in the public collections of such prominent institutions as Art Institute of Chicago; Brooklyn Museum, New York; Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Museum of Modern Art, New York; National Gallery of Art, Washington D.C.; and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York.

Gladstone 64
130 East 64 Street, New York, NY 10065
www.gladstone64.com

Amy Sillman @ Capitain Petzel, Berlin

Amy Sillman, ein Paar 
Capitain Petzel, Berlin 
September 15 - November 11, 2017 

Capitain Petzel presents the second solo exhibition of New York artist AMY SILLMAN at the gallery’s Berlin space. Entitled »ein Paar«, the exhibition takes place on the occasion of this year’s Berlin Art Week.

Drawing is the starting point and method for this exhibition, an expanded material investigation that moves from painting to animation. Compelled by the implications of the German phrase »ein Paar«, (a couple or a few), the artist has realized pairs and groups of works, including a large di- ptych on canvas, a series of works on paper utilizing both printmaking and gestural drawing, and a video animation combining digital and hand-made layers. Keenly attuned to language itself, Sill- man is interested in generating mismatches, disjunctions, and parapraxis from the materiality of the calligraphic impulse. Her work seems to constantly generate beginnings and transformations: ultimately she registers the process of change itself.

In recent works, Amy Sillman has explored seriality and machine formats, using inkjet-printed canvasses generated from her drawings. In this show, she continues the exploration using silkscreen prin- ting with drawing. In her video »After Metamorphoses«, an endlessly-morphing digital line, which loosely following the narrative of Ovid’s work, »The Metamorphoses«, plays atop a backdrop of process-based inks-on-paper. The video also features a soundtrack by the Berlin-based musician Wibke Tiarks.

Amy Sillman’s new book, »the All-Over«, co-published by Dancing Foxes Press, Portikus, and Mousse Publishing, makes its debut at this exhibition, and is available throughout the show. This fully-illustrated monograph explores Amy Sillman’s work in painting, drawing, and animation, and con- tains essays by curator Manuela Ammer (MuMOK, Vienna) and art historian Yve-Alain Bois.

AMY SILLMAN (born 1955 in Detroit) lives and works in New York City. Since 2015 she has held the position of Professor at the Städelschule in Frankfurt/Main. Her works have been recently exhibited internationally in solo exhibitions at The Drawing Center, New York (2017), Portikus, Frankfurt/Main (2016) and Kunsthaus Bregenz (2015). Her exhibition »one lump or two« originated at the Institute of Contemporary Art Boston in 2014, toured the Aspen Art Museum and the Center for Curatorial Studies at Bard College, New York. Her works have been presented, among others, in group shows at Brandhorst Museum, Munich (2015), Tate Modern, London (2015) and MoMA, New York (2014).

CAPITAIN PETZEL 

Kark-Marx-Allee 45, 10178 Berlin

www.capitainpetzel.de

You can also read on Wanafoto the post about the first exhibition of Amy Sillman at Capitain Petzel in 2011: Amy Sillman: Thumb Cinema  

Amy Sillman at Capitain Petzel, Berlin

Amy Sillman, Thumb Cinema
Capitain Petzel, Berlin
November 5 - December 23, 2011

AMY SILLMAN

Nancy 2 (thank you to Bushmiller and Brainard) 2011

Digitally altered comic strip

© Amy Sillman, Courtesy Capitain Petzel, Berlin

Gisela Capitain and Friedrich Petzel present the first solo exhibition by AMY SILLMAN at Capitain Petzel in Berlin. Amy Sillman‘s newest work includes high and low, fast and slow, large and small, and ranges across mediums, from large-scale oil paintings to a 7-minute digital animation and several hundred inkjet prints made from stills of the animation.

Amy Sillman foregrounds the materiality of painting and its formal, psychological, and conceptual dimensions. She constructs her work in a physical way — through gesture, color, and drawing-based procedures — imbuing it with questions of feminism, performativity, and humor. In this show, as always, she is intensively engaged with drawing and its corporeality: drawings that she makes with her little finger on an iPhone screen, and the drawing process inherent to large-scale paintings which she makes using brushes, rags, scrapers and giant oil crayons. Her work is an ongoing negotiation between the improvisatory and the structural aspects of thinking itself, with painting posited as a language in which to express thinking in a formal and affective way. Over the past few years, Amy Sillman has also been staging painting shows that include their own comical forms of questions to painting itself. She has hung paintings alongside their own friendly, democratic forms of accompaniment, such as ‘zines, CDs, and posters. For this new solo show at Capitain Petzel, she proposes the most everyday form of digital technology -- the iPhone -- as the tool for the comic foil that accompanies her new oil paintings. Her digital animated drawing, „Pinky‘s Rule“ plays continuously alongside the paintings. While it loops, its images continually transform and mutate, and it sheds light on the procedures of the paintings. In Amy Sillman‘s hands, large oil paintings can be seen as points in a series of continually transforming moments that continue to roll on, rather than heroic endpoints. In this way, Sillman provides her own comical question to the dialectic of painting itself.

AMY SILLMAN‘s bibliography includes Amy Sillman: Works on Paper (Gregory R. Miller, 2006), a monograph of her drawings with text by Wayne Koestenbaum, and Between Artists: Gregg Bordowitz and Amy Sillman (ART Press, NY, 2009.) Sillman earned her BFA from the School of Visual Arts in New York and her MFA from Bard College in 1995. She has received numerous awards and grants, including a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Louise Comfort Tiffany Foundation Award, the Guna S. Mundheim Fellowship at the American Academy in Berlin in 2009. Her work has been widely exhibited and collected in public and private collections, including The Museum of Modern Art in New York, The Art Institute of Chicago, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and the Whitney Museum of American Art. A survey of her work will be exhibited in 2013 at the Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston, which will be accompanied by a book.

CAPITAIN PETZEL
Kark-Marx-Allee 45, 10178 Berlin
www.capitainpetzel.de