“Color as object is earthly material stuff. Color as subject arches over everything like a rainbow, from cosmic rays to the minerals in the earth to what happens inside your eyes, from religious symbology to philosophical problems, from phenomena to noumena...”
— Amy Sillman
Painted in 2001, Amy Sillman’s Cart showcases her signature mode of painting, combining thick impasto with sweeping gestural strokes in a pastel palette gone rogue. Weaving an optical tapestry of color and form, Sillman draws the viewer into a painterly world of ochre, crimson and laurel green, coalesced into an arching horizon.
At the heart of Sillman’s practice lies in the role of color. Often preferring jarring combinations that produce aesthetic tension, the artist employs color as the genre to survey the range of expressive possibilities in painting. For Sillman, color is foregrounded as “her thick and intense layering of color balances spontaneity with struggle, intense form with loose improvisation, and childlike imagery with loaded psychological implications.”i In the artist’s own words, "I am more interested in color as an engine of ongoing change and metamorphosis than as a static theory....Color is a primary tool for negation in my work—colors that block each other out or contradict each other, and are mixed in an archeologico-dialectic of continual deconstruction and reconstruction."ii
Likened to the work of Willem de Kooning, Richard Diebenkorn, and Philip Guston, Sillman’s paintings hover at the boundaries of figuration and abstraction. The present work exemplifies how the artist “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.”iii As Max Henry observes, “Like a DJ sampling, she is cross-referencing as if she was a postmodern Fauve. Cézanne, Chagall, late Guston and Carroll Dunham are distilled in a lyrical remix hinting at landscapes and interiors derived from instant memory.”iv