Amongst the most distinctive voices in contemporary painting, Amy Sillman (b. 1955 Detroit, USA) is exhibiting through all the galleries for her first institutional exhibition in the UK.

Over the last three decades, she has interrogated the language and practice of painting, re-evaluating its history and extending its reach into emergent mechanical and digital processes. Working in New York, Sillman’s wayward form of abstraction has pushed defiantly at the process-oriented approaches typically associated with the traditions of post-war painting, infusing her work with a modern sensibility, critical self-reflexivity and humour.

Many of Sillman’s works undergo prolonged periods of gestation during which they are reworked, layered, washed over, scraped back, reoriented, sanded and embellished; ultimately moved from one state to another. This physical and emotional process is inscribed in the accretions of the work’s rendered surfaces; an energy of antagonism resides in forms that remain somehow in flux, feelings that don’t resolve, signs that don’t signify and materials that struggle between construction and deconstruction.

Sillman’s entire back catalogue of self-published zines will be available for visitors to take away, alongside a new issue created especially for Camden Arts Centre. In a new site-specific installation, Sillman is working in a bold new format for the very first time, creating a sequence of large double-sided works on paper that combine print, drawing and painting. Landline explores the depth and scope of Sillman’s exuberant practice ranging from the political and social to the emotional and psychological in an extraordinary body of work that encompasses gestural drawing, painting, silkscreen print processes, video animation and zines.

Supported by the Amy Sillman Exhibition Circle and Cockayne – Grants for the Arts and the London Community Foundation.

Amy Sillman (b. 1955, Detroit, USA) lives and works in New York City. Her works have been exhibited internationally in solo exhibitions which include: Gladstone 64, New York (2018); Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo (2017); The Drawing Center, New York (2017); Portikus, Frankfurt/Main (2016); Kunsthaus Bregenz (2015); ICA Boston, MA; Aspen Art Museum and Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College, Annandale-on-Hudson, NY (all 2013). Her works have been presented in countless group exhibitions at public institutions including: Lenbachhaus, Munich, Germany (2018); Kunsthaus Hamburg (2017); Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit, Detroit (2017); Modern Art Oxford, UK (2016); Whitney Museum of Art, New York (2016, 2015, 2014); Hammer Museum at Art + Practice, Los Angeles, CA (2016); Tate Modern, London (2015); Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) (2014); Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), New York (2014); Wexner Center, Columbus (2013); and Kunstverein München, Germany (2013). Since 2015 Sillman has held the position of Professor at the Städelschule in Frankfurt/Main.