Opener 15
Amy Sillman: Third Person Singular

Amy Sillman is an uncompromising painter. The Brooklyn-based artist’s widely influential body of work has built on familiar formats such as landscape, portraiture, abstraction, and caricature, only to move past them, pushing these motifs and categories into new places. Since August 2006, Sillman has engaged a very traditional practice: drawing figures from life. Seventeen different couples, all of them close friends and peers, are depicted in black-ink drawings. Sillman deliberately places herself as the third person in a triangle, allowing for a distanced view while acknowledging her profound connection to her subjects. After the sessions, she makes further drawings, some memory-based, some analytical, and uses these as a template for an entirely new set of paintings. The details of the figures gradually drain of representation as the forms become more geometric and structural. On view for the first time, these drawings and paintings negotiate and complicate the intersections between abstraction and figuration.