Amy Sillman
Opening June 28, 2025, Dia Bridgehampton
Overview
Since the 1990s, Amy Sillman has produced a prolific body of paintings, zines, prints, and animations featuring an expansive vocabulary of gestures that move seamlessly between figuration and abstraction. Sillman builds up layered yet flattened compositions that belie her process-oriented way of working, resulting in, as the artist describes, “. . . an open field, where figure and ground are in very ambivalent, complex relationships.” The allover method of her paintings often extends to her exhibitions, as she treats the walls like blank pages, spaces for iterative prints and works on paper to accumulate, engaging both the temporal and spatial dimensions of the work and its surroundings. At Dia Bridgehampton, Sillman extends this totalizing sensibility in a site-responsive commission for the ground-floor gallery, beginning with a question: Can printmaking itself serve as a model and method for a whole room? To answer this question, she proposes a room of printed and hand-painted walls, a ground for other printed and handmade forms to be placed on. Sillman’s extensive writing on color can serve as a particular point of departure for the exhibition, conceived partially in response to the chromatic vibrations of the permanent Dan Flavin installation on the second floor.
Amy Sillman is curated by Jordan Carter, curator and co–department head, with Emily Markert, curatorial assistant.
All exhibitions at Dia are made possible by the Economou Exhibition Fund.
Amy Sillman was born in Detroit in 1955. She is renowned for her complex process-based and multidisciplinary work, which encompasses painting, drawing, printmaking, animation, writing, and site-specific projects, and infuses abstraction with humor, formal and conceptual questions, and a rigorous physicality. Since the 1990s, she has received numerous awards and grants, including a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2001, and has exhibited 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 Oh, Clock! at Kunstmuseum Bern, Switzerland (2024–25), traveling to Ludwig Forum Aachen, Germany (2024–25). 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 (2020) is now in its fourth reprint. 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 and works in New York.
Artist
Amy Sillman
Amy Sillman was born in Detroit in 1955. She lives in New York City.