Amy Sillman at The Arts Club of Chicago

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Maybe Sillman's paintings are uglycute in the way fetuses are ugly, there's not enough drawing to hold the shape nor body to give it viscera, which is why they have that newborn quality of looking like pink pencil erasers more than human, painting and fetus both. A confusion of painting and drawing (within painting specifically, the processes distinct from their materials we could say) that give them that uncanny modern nubility. Abject, sure. About to realize some full state if never completing it, the continual caroming off reaching full maturity.

Amy Sillman at Sikkema Jenkins

Amy Sillman at Sikkema Jenkins

A tragic affair collectors seek "signature" pieces, a signature piece requisite the artist already having a signature and thus emptied of its origination, adolescence, nubility and becoming etc, that Sillmans work, generally, seems about. A signature painting means "in the style of oneself" which sounds affected and self-conscious in a way popular 8 years ago that we thought Sillman had absorbed and moved us past, but here we are: "becoming" is literalized in the animation cell paintings, painting subordinate to precedent and subsequent - provisional - another painting-buzz Sillman had once passed. The most becoming paintings here are the small ones in which the self seems at stake, no Sillman line to hold the Sillman form she once insisted the body-politic of, instead a sort of becoming Frankenthaler, an interesting thing for Sillman to become someone else, not-Sillman.


See too: Amy Sillman at Kunsthaus Bregenz

Amy Sillman at Kunsthaus Bregenz

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The Kristeva quote provides a new sort of entrance, theorizer of the abject, if the abject was all about the object attaining body, milk curdling flesh, that Sillman's painting too curdle representation, bodies.