NAPLES.- In April, for her second exhibition with Thomas Dane Gallery and her first in Naples, Amy Sillman (b. 1955, Detroit MI) is presenting Temporary Object: a body of work that includes recent paintings, works on paper, and a new series of 40 sequential diagrams printed on aluminium, which will continue until July 29th.

The title Temporary Object serves as a primordial (and almost metaphysical) questioning on the nature of Painting. Sillman’s sense of painting is as a kind of container, an object that develops within time. In computer terminology, a temporary object is “an unnamed object created by the compiler to store a temporary value.” Though resolutely handmade, her work also deals with a transitive and speculative kind of fullness and emptiness. The exhibition Temporary Object continues to expand upon the methods and systems she has explored over the years, and the idea of Painting as a continuously-altered and layered construction.

Presented in the setting of the City and the Bay of Naples, a place buried in its own history but never buried by traditions nor rules, the exhibition will aim to excavate the archaeologies and histories rooted in Sillman’s own work.

Amy Sillman is an artist based in New York since 1975. After studying Japanese language at NYU, she received a BFA in painting in 1979 at School of Visual Arts in New York City, and then an MFA in painting at Bard College in 1995. While still an undergraduate in the 1970s, a teacher told Sillman that she had to “decide between” figuration and abstraction—ever since then, her work has been based on proving that binary (and others) wrong. Instead, she welcomes contradiction and dialectics into gestural painting procedures, working both fast, improvisationally, and slow, with a nearly archaeological process of accumulation and redaction of innumerable layers.

Over the past 15+ years, Sillman has added writing, curating, zine-making, animation, and site-specific installations to her practice. Her work is held in numerous private and public collections, including the Museum of Modern Art, New York NY, the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York NY, the Museum of Contemporary Art Los Angeles CA, Tate Modern, London, the Brandhorst Museum, Munich, and the Moderna Museet, Stockholm. A mid-career traveling survey show one lump or two, curated by Helen Molesworth, originated at the ICA Boston in 2013 accompanied by a catalogue. In 2019 a monograph by Valerie Wade was published by Lund Humphries, London. In 2022 Sillman participated in The International Exhibition of the 59th Venice Biennale The Milk of Dreams.

Besides her work as a painter, Sillman often writes on art, and her bibliography includes Faux Pas, a book of collected texts and drawings published in 2020 by After Eight Books in Paris. Her own work has been written about regularly in journals such as Artforum, Art News, Texte zur Kunst, and Frieze, and other publications. Sillman is represented by Gladstone Gallery in New York, and Capitain Petzel in Berlin, and shows Thomas Dane in London and Naples, Campoli Presti in Paris, and Susanne Vielmetter in LA.