LONDON.- Camden Arts Centre is presenting the first institutional exhibition of American painter Amy Sillman in the United Kingdom. Taking over all of the galleries at Camden Arts Centre, the exhibition, which includes over 30 new works, explores the breadth of Sillman’s practice, encompassing gestural drawing, painting, digital and silkscreen print processes, video animation and zines, as well as a new site-specific installation created especially for the show.

Over the last three decades, Sillman has interrogated the language and practice of painting, reevaluating its history and extending its reach into emergent mechanical and digital processes. Amongst the most distinctive voices in contemporary painting, she is known for challenging expectations. Having developed a wayward form of abstraction that extended the more process-oriented approaches typically associated with the traditions of post-war painting, Sillman brings a modern sensibility that includes a critical self-reflexivity, feminism 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 works’ rendered surfaces, an energy of antagonism is felt in forms that remain somehow in flux, materials struggle between construction and deconstruction.

For this exhibition, Sillman has produced a new body of works on canvas, as well as continuing to push defiantly at the supposed limits of painting by expanding her practice into screen-printing, animation and her self-published zines. Sillman’s entire back catalogue of zines is being featured in the show, alongside a new issue created especially for Camden Arts Centre, available for visitors to take away. In a major new work commissioned for the exhibition, Sillman has created a series of large-scale, double-sided, hybrid works that combine print, drawing and painting, which are installed in direct dialogue with the architecture of the space. Working with this format for the very first time, this is a unique opportunity for audiences to encounter an important new departure in Sillman’s work as well as experiencing the depth and scope of her exuberant practice.

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.