Amy Sillman @ Camden Arts Centre

Amongst the most distinctive voices in contemporary painting, Amy Sillman has interrogated the language and practice of painting, re-evaluating its history and extending its reach into emergent mechanical and digital processes. Working in New York, Sillman’s wayward form of abstraction has pushed defiantly at the process-oriented approaches typically associated with the traditions of post-war painting, infusing her work with a modern sensibility, critical self-reflexivity and humour.
Many of Sillman’s works undergo prolonged periods of gestation during which they are reworked, layered, washed over, scraped back, reoriented, sanded and embellished; ultimately moved from one state to another. This physical and emotional process is inscribed in the accretions of the work’s rendered surfaces; an energy of antagonism resides in forms that remain somehow in flux, feelings that don’t resolve, signs that don’t signify and materials that struggle between construction and deconstruction.