Amy Sillman’s work is highly intuitive; her rich, colourful paintings flow with a stream of conscious expression. In her canvases, forms effuse in disjointed rhythm, colour has the weightlessness of pure light. The delight in Sillman’s work is in the complexity of her
application. “In Cliff 2 the bright orange polygon in the middle of the painting rhymes beautifully with an angled slab of black, some blue cartoon clouds, a messy expanse of loosely painted flowers and a swatch of flowery fabric. Two pairs of long legs, which belong in a kid’s stick-figure drawing of a couple of ducks, descend from the picture’s top edge, suggesting even goofier goings-on beyond its border.” David Pagel. In her study of how to express the totality of something, she becomes absorbed in the semiotics of painterly language itself: thick impasto mixes readily with sly dabs and drizzles, radiant hues and hurried gestures appear in their own space and time. Amy Sillman’s composition suggests private thought that is simultaneously whimsical and brutal.