David Zwirner has announced the representation of New York–based artist Amy Sillman. Sillman’s first exhibition with the gallery will be in New York in 2027.
Amy Sillman is widely recognized as one of the most significant painters of her generation. Since the early 1990s, she has developed a multidisciplinary practice that spans painting, drawing, digital animation, printmaking, large-scale installations, and critical writing. Sillman’s process-oriented work navigates the contested terrains between images and words, line and shape, object and site, meaning and feeling.
The artist’s decisive compositions emerge from accumulated layers of painting, erasure, and revision in a process that is at once slow and immediate, deliberate and impulsive, and ultimately considers notions of time. Engaging deeply with the history of painting, Sillman draws from a wide range of high and low art influences and precedents—from gestural to hard-edge painting, abstract expressionism to minimalist seriality—excavating and remaking them in an expansive practice that speaks to the present. The artist also deploys diverse modes of inquiry from film, music, and philosophy, using humor, improvisation, and ambiguity as radical strategies for dismantling hierarchies and constructing new meaning.
As Barry Schwabsky writes:
“If painting is really drawing [in Sillman’s work], then her drawing is really animation, and her animation is really painting, so that the distinct aspects of her work are in fact stages in a single process—which I am going to insist on calling painting. The practice exposes an iterative process in which adding is also effacing, and in which unnameable shapes simply represent feelings more unfathomable than those that can be summed up in, say, a depiction of legs and feet.”1
David Zwirner states,
“I love Amy Sillman’s work, and I’m so honored that she has decided to join the gallery. Her artmaking is endlessly intelligent, as it operates on so many levels simultaneously. Amy treats painting as a form of thinking itself, where every mark contains both construction and demolition, certainty and doubt. She has this remarkable ability to mine the entire history of the medium in the process. Her practice also encompasses much more than painting. Seeing Amy’s multidisciplinary approach in full action in the Ludwig Forum in Aachen last year was a true revelation. There, alongside a powerful survey of her work, Amy recontextualized a rather static and peculiar museum collection. Using the museum’s walls as a support for her painterly gesamtkunstwerk, Amy managed to reframe the art of her colleagues with a deep sense of humanity and humor, creating an environment that was entirely novel and contemporary. In her wide-ranging practice she is completely unafraid to take risks, and in the process prompts us—generously, humorously, rigorously—to see things in new ways. I couldn’t be more excited to be part of the next chapter of Amy’s extraordinary career.”
About the Artist:
Amy Sillman was born in 1955 in Detroit. She studied at Beloit College in Wisconsin; New York University; and the School of Visual Arts in New York, where she earned a BFA in 1979. She received an MFA from Bard College, Annandale-on-Hudson, New York, in 1995.
Sillman has exhibited widely since the 1990s. Her first institutional solo presentation, Amy Sillman: Procession, was held at the Institute of Contemporary Art, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, in 2004. In 2008, the Smithsonian Institution co-organized the solo exhibition, Directions, Amy Sillman: Third Person Singular, which was presented at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, DC, and then traveled to the Frances Young Tang Teaching Museum and Art Gallery at Skidmore College, Saratoga Springs, New York. The artist was the subject of the 2013 exhibition curated by Helen Molesworth, Amy Sillman: one lump or two, at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston, which traveled to the Aspen Art Museum and Hessel Museum of Art, Bard College, Annandale-on-Hudson, New York, through the following year.
Additional solo exhibitions of Sillman’s work have been presented at Kunsthaus Bregenz, Austria (2015-2016); Portikus, Frankfurt am Main (2016); The Drawing Center, New York (2017; traveled to Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, New York); Camden Arts Centre, London (2018); and Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum, St. Louis (2021).
Most recently, in 2024, Amy Sillman: Oh, Clock!, the artist’s first major institutional solo exhibition in Europe, was presented at Kunstmuseum Bern, before traveling to Ludwig Forum Aachen in 2025.
The artist is the recipient of the Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation Award (1999); Pollock-Krasner Foundation Fellowship (1999); Joan Mitchell Foundation Fellowship (1999); John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship in Painting (2001); Guna S. Mundheim Fellowship in the Visual Arts (2009); Asher B. Durand Award (2012); Charles Flint Kellogg Award in Arts and Letters (2014); and Yaddo Artist Medal (2024), among other prestigious honors.
In addition to exhibiting her work, Sillman is also actively engaged with teaching. She has served on the faculty of numerous universities including Städelschule, Staatliche Hochschule für Bildende Künste, Frankfurt am Main (2014–2019); Columbia University, New York (2006–2010); Parsons School of Design, New York (2005); Bard College, Annandale-on-Hudson, New York (1997–2013; co-Chair of Painting Department 2002–2013); Dartmouth College, Hanover, New Hampshire (2002); and Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, Maine (2000; Resident Artist), among others.
A collection of Sillman’s writing, Amy Sillman: Faux Pas, was published in 2020 by After 8 Books and has since been republished in expanded and foreign language editions. The artist has also contributed numerous essays to catalogues of exhibitions held at international institutions, including Fridericianum, Kassel; National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC; Kunsthaus Zürich; and The Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art, Ithaca, New York. She has written frequently for art magazines and publications such as Artforum, Texte zur Kunst, Bomb Magazine, and The Washington Post.
Work by the artist is held in important institutions worldwide including Art Institute of Chicago; Brooklyn Museum, New York; Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; Hessel Museum of Art, Bard College, Annandale-On-Hudson, New York; Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, DC; Lenbachhaus, Munich; Milwaukee Art Museum, Wisconsin; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Moderna Museet, Stockholm; Musée d’Art Moderne, Paris; Museo di Arte Moderna e Contemporanea di Trento e Rovereto, Trent, Italy; Museum Brandhorst, Munich; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; The Museum of Modern Art, New York; National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; and Whitney Museum of American Art, New York.
1 Barry Schwabsky, “Amy Sillman,” Artforum [vol. 63 no. 1]. September 2024 (accessed online).
