Amy Sillman (b. 1955) works fluidly across painting, drawing, printmaking, animation, writing, and installation. Her practice probes the material and conceptual boundaries of painting—testing how gesture, color, and form can both construct and undo meaning. Moving between figuration and abstraction, Sillman uses humor, doubt, and self-irony to challenge painting’s claims to mastery and authority.

Over the past several decades, she has developed a vocabulary that is at once physical and reflective: layered biomorphic shapes and gestural marks coexist with moments of awkwardness, erasure, and transformation. Through this interplay of intuition and analysis, Sillman exposes the instability of form itself—turning painting into a site of struggle, revision, and thought. “Painting,” she has said, “is never only about color or surface—it’s about shape, struggle, transformation, gesture, and time.” Her work reanimates abstraction for the 21st century, embracing imperfection and play as essential conditions of contemporary life.

Sillman's work has been the subject of numerous solo exhibitions at institutions including: Arts Club of Chicago, Illinois; Camden Arts Centre, London; Albright Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, New York; The Drawing Center, New York; Portikus, Frankfurt am Main, Germany; Kunsthaus Bregenz, Austria; and the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, D.C. In 2014, Sillman’s solo exhibition, one lump or two, traveled from the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston, to the Aspen Art Museum in Colorado and the Center for Curatorial Studies at Bard College, New York. In 2022, Sillman participated in The International Exhibition of the 59th Venice Biennale, The Milk of Dreams. Sillman's book of writing on art, Faux Pas, was published by After 8 Books in Paris, in 2020, and is now in its third printing. Sillman’s works are held in the public collections of prominent institutions such as the 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.

Amy Sillman has been experimenting with printmaking at Two Palms since 2024. The artist's monotypes are currently on view at Dia Bridgehampton in the exhibition Amy Sillman: Alternate Side (Permutations #1–32), open through May 2026.