Amy Sillman: One Lump or Two

The Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston

Through Jan. 5

Amy Sillman is “one of the most exciting painters around,” said Sebastian Smee in The Boston Globe. “A skittishly self-conscious yet rambunctious artist,” the Detroit-born, Brooklyn-based late bloomer has since about 2006 been producing bold, exuberant canvases that somehow manage to blend “the verbal and graphic wit of Saul Steinberg, the cartoon-inspired clunkiness of Philip Guston, and the effulgent color sense of Richard Diebenkorn.” Now 57, Sillman spent her previous decades creating “fascinating works on paper, many of them mordantly funny cartoons.” But her breakthrough occurred when color became central to her work. Her recent paintings “tend to leave a sense memory of musky pinks” and “soft yellows,” yet it’s challenging to even make generalizations about her palette because she appears to be always in motion, shifting course, painting over false starts. The work is “suggestive of thought itself, with its endless second-guessing,” even “its tendency to tire, flop, and fall to the floor.”

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Sillman’s paintings are often “part abstraction, part cartoon,” said Greg Cook in WBUR.org. In 2003’s Me & Ugly Mountain, a comic strip–style woman set against a snowy landscape drags behind her an enormous sack of multicolored doodles that seem to symbolize psychological baggage. But Sillman has begun of late to let her cartoon figures disintegrate. In the largely abstract 2009 canvas Junker 1, “you might detect a neck at the top and legs along the bottom,” but it’s hard to be sure you’re not just over-interpreting some jagged black lines. These late works continue to exhibit “an endearingly modest, playful feel” even as they “radiate anxiety.” We still sense that Sillman is speaking to us and about us, but “more and more, the texture and color of the paint itself” are being asked to convey emotion.