These pandemic months have been so full and fraught, so lacking the silence we foresaw with the initial shelter-in-place orders, that one of its first clichés has fallen into obscurity. Do you remember, mid-March, when everyone kept recalling that Shakespeare wrote “King Lear” while in quarantine? As an inducement to write that novel or learn that new language, it felt hollow as early as April.
Well, not everyone lost their focus in the discord and inundation of 2020. Amy Sillman did not. The New York painter — who’d already scored a big hit last year with “The Shape of Shape,” a show she curated at the reopened Museum of Modern Art — has had a year of unparalleled productivity, even as the coronavirus outbreak kept her from her usual studio. What’s up now in her new show “Twice Removed,” which opened last week at Gladstone Gallery in Chelsea, is just a fraction of the hundreds of abstract paintings she produced over the last 12 months: layered, supercharged compositions of purple, green and goldenrod, overlaid or interrupted by thick contours, daubed stripes, peeking hints of a cup or leg.