Sillman’s work in painting and drawing has been shaped by her basic notion of artmaking as a conduit for change. Rather than working toward beauty or grandeur, Sillman’s work proposes a cheerfully skeptical attitude toward traditional categories (such as abstraction or figuration). Instead, she continuously re-investigates various formal structures – figure and ground, color and line, painting and drawing, representation and nonrepresentation – as dichotomies that her work refutes through the presentation of energetic figures within liminal grounds. With this sense of an activated present, Sillman emancipates viewers from the preconceived expectations of a “finished” piece that captures a singular moment, stating that “each work is a continual painterly process of destruction and recreation, often going on for months before it comes to a kind of conclusion, a conclusion which is itself an open question.”
Gladstone
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