"The Other One"

April 2 - May 7, 2005

Reception: Saturday, April 2, 6 - 8 pm

Susanne Vielmetter Los Angeles Projects is pleased to present new works by Amy Sillman in her second solo exhibition at the gallery.

The exhibition was conceived as a purposeful confrontation of oppositional forces: drawing versus painting, small versus large scale, abstraction versus figuration.  At the center of this confrontation is Sillman’s dialectic approach towards painting that is defined by a continuous dialogue between various states, as a back and forth between cartoon-like drawing and bold abstraction.  In her newest large scale canvases she explores gesture and movement in the context of an “irrational landscape”, a space that may not make spatial sense but is defined by stacking, cutaways, and multi-tiered horizons.

Like in her previous work, Sillman uses color as the foreground in her work.  She prefers a skewed pastel palette bordering on awkward and uncomfortable tones.  Her thick and intense layering of color balances spontaneity with struggle, intense form with loose improvisation, and childlike imagery with loaded psychological implications.  The characters that populate her work may appear naïve on first sight, but they bear a concentrated psychological intensity that counterbalances the powerful abstract fields surrounding them.

Amy Sillman received her MFA in Painting at Bard College in 1995.  She has received numerous awards and fellowships, among them the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship in Painting, the Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation Award, the Joan Mitchell Foundation Fellowship, the Pollock-Krasner Foundation Fellowship and a NEA Fellowship in Painting.  Her work has been exhibited, among others, at the Whitney Biennale 2004; the Institute of Contemporary Art, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, at the Jaffe-Friede Strauss Galleries, Hopkins Center, Dartmouth College, Hanover, New Hampshire; at the Brooklyn Museum, at the Johnson County Community College Gallery of Art, Overland Park, Kansas; at the Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburg; at the New Orleans Contemporary Arts Center, New Orleans, at the Palm Beach Institute for Contemporary Art, Lake Worth, at the Staatsgalerie Stuttgart, Germany, the Cincinnati Center for Contemporary Art, Cincinnati, Ohio, the Weatherspoon Gallery, University of North Carolina, the Brent Sikkema Gallery, New York, Casey Kaplan, New York, Entwistle, London, and Galleria Marabini, Bologna, Italy.  Amy Sillman is represented by Brent Sikkema Gallery in New York.

Susanne Vielmetter Los Angeles Projects is located at 5795 West Washington Blvd in Culver City, between Fairfax and La Cienega, within walking distance of the Blum & Poe Gallery.  Gallery Hours are Tuesday through Saturday from 12 - 6 pm and by appointment.  Directions: Coming from downtown, take the 10 frwy west, exit at the Washington / Fairfax exit, turn left, it's the second building on your right.  10 frwy coming from the westside, take the La Cienega exit, go south to Washington Blvd, turn left, the building is in the 3rd block on your left, next to the Dunn Edwards store.