Amy Sillman is a highly regarded painter, writer, and curator based in New York. One might regard her as a consummate insider. The artist has a solo exhibition at Gladstone Gallery this May but hails from a lineage of outsiders like Simone de Beauvoir, Édouard Glissant, and Patti Smith. She is fascinated by language, a certified “language freak,” yet deeply invested in the sensorium of lived experience, and she ponders how that experience is ultimately unnameable. These issues play out best in the studio. The artist paints large expanses of color with gestural brushwork, and then layers, scrapes, and negates as she negotiates resolution and irresolution. At times she applies dense networks of stripes that rest on color-fields framed by dark outlines; some moves appear to counteract others, disrupting a sense of intentionality. Some paintings lie in wait for days or weeks in a kind of purgatory awaiting final judgment, conflict, or painterly redemption. In this way, Sillman is a painter who flirts with alienation.
The art world often speaks of otherness but less of alienation. Alienation has aesthetic roots in German Expressionism’s bohemia, its painterly depiction of clowns, prostitutes, and vagrants—the underbelly of bourgeois society. Although bohemia may no longer exist for painters, it remains a psychological home. Alienation produces generative doubt, a reasonable skepticism. This is a contemporary condition after Postmodernism. Abstraction is no longer a grand project; in its wake are misfit parts that no longer resemble a whole, but they can be reimagined.