Post War and Contemporary Art

Provenance:

Sikkema Jenkins & Co, New York

Acquired from the above by the present owner in 2015

Lot essay:

“Color as an object is earthly material stuff. Color as subject arches over everything like a rainbow, from cosmic rays to the minerals in the earth to what happens inside your eyes, from religious symbology to philosophical problems, from phenomena to noumena. But aside from all that, color is just the tool that a painter wields in making a painting. To deal with color as a painter is to render these overarching problems as physical propositions, as sensuous experiences synesthetically merged under the sign of the hand.” - Amy Sillman

Amy Sillman’s paintings occupy a vibrant space between abstraction and figuration, where color and gesture become tools for exploring emotion, thought, and perception. Her abstraction resists purity; instead, it embraces awkwardness, revision, and contradiction. Sillman builds and reworks her compositions through layers of paint, allowing traces of earlier decisions to remain visible, creating a sense of both movement and psychological depth.

Color in Sillman’s work is both expressive and disruptive, as shown in the present lot Untitled, which the artist completed in 2014. She juxtaposes muted tones with jolts of saturated hues—acidic greens against dusky purples or fleshy pinks beside gray tonalities—to evoke tension and surprise. These unexpected combinations challenge harmony and instead convey the complexity and nuance of feeling. Her color acts as a form of inquiry, exposing the instability of visual and emotional experience.

Through this dynamic interplay of color, form, and gesture, Sillman redefines abstraction as a deeply human practice—intellectual, humorous, and profoundly affective.