Amy Sillman: Faux Pas: Selected Writings and Drawings
"Sillman is in a thin crowd (with, let's say, Andrea Fraser, Hito Steyerl, Matias Faldbakken, David Salle) of artists who can really write. The evidence is in Faux Pas ... her writings display the same good humor and intelligence of her best paintings." -Jason Farago, New York Times
This new edition of Faux Pas, the acclaimed collection of writings by Amy Sillman, comes as an expanded edition, with the addition of new essays, including recent texts on Paul Cézanne, Carolee Schneemann, Elizabeth Murray and Louise Fishman. The previously unpublished text from a lecture on drawing complements Sillman's views on color and shape. New drawings from 2020-22 include a selection of works on paper that were part of the artist's installation at the 59th International Venice Biennale, The Milk of Dreams, in 2022.
Since the 1970s, Sillman--a beloved and key figure of the New York art scene--has developed a singular body of work that includes large-scale gestural paintings blending abstraction with representation, as well as zines and iPad animations.
Over the past decade, Sillman has also produced stimulating essays on the practice of art or the work of other artists: for example, reevaluating the work of the abstract expressionists with a queer eye; elaborating on the role of awkwardness and the body in the artistic process; and discussing in depth the role and meanings of color and shape. Featuring a foreword by Lynne Tillman, Faux Pas gathers a significant selection of Sillman's essays, reviews and lectures, accompanied by drawings, most of them made specially for the book.
Faux Pas aims at revealing the coherence and originality of Sillman's reflection, as she addresses the possibilities of art today, favoring excess over good taste, wrestling over dandyism, forms over symbols, with as much critical sense as humor.
Based in New York City, Amy Sillman (born 1955) is an artist whose work consistently combines the visceral with the intellectual. She began to study painting in the 1970s at the School of Visual Arts and she received her MFA from Bard College in 1995. Her work has been exhibited internationally, including at the Whitney Biennial in 2014 and the Venice Biennale in 2022; her writing has appeared in Bookforum and Artforum, among other publications. She is currently represented by Gladstone Gallery, New York.
Earn by promoting books
Earn money by sharing your favorite books through our Affiliate program.
Become an affiliate
Brainy, gregarious, and often hilarious texts...--Bookforum Editors "Bookforum"
These essays together are a wonderful mental embrace. Sillman's voice is cool, patient, incessant, vulnerable, nostalgic, hilarious; actually what's the word for when someone is kind, clear, sharp and opaque all at once? Someone who speaks straight from the shoulder? Or maybe the elbow: I think Sillman is speaking from the hand in that the ligaments joining feeling and action are lovingly prodded. She is explicit, she's serious in that she isn't always that serious, but she's serious, she's plain, direct, I mean, I hung on her words.--Rindon Johnson
Amy Sillman tells us that a tube of cadmium red has a different weight than say cobalt violet and that all painters know this and art historians mostly don't. Sillman is shocked to think about someone who beholds paint but has never held it and she stands in the doorway of that thought, bleeding back and forth and she writes in it & it's a rare rare place she's standing in. Pick up her Faux Pas. You'll be dazzled as I am by this knowledge, her rarity.--Eileen Myles
Indeed Ms. Sillman is in a thin crowd (with, let's say, Andrea Fraser, Hito Steyerl, Matias Faldbakken, David Salle) of artists who can really write. The evidence is in "Faux Pas," a just-published collection -- her fourth -- of her writings that display the same good humor and intelligence of her best paintings.--Jason Farago "New York Times"
Amy Sillman's richness of personality and world view shines so beautifully throughout Faux Pas, that it becomes a kind of illumination, lighting the reader's way through a world of ideas and language and images no one but Sillman, in all her brilliance, could have produced. A generous triumph.--Hilton Als
Faux Pas comprises seventeen texts written for journals, zines, and lectures between 2009 and 2020 [...]The book asks, and often answers by example: How to talk about painting today? How to reckon with its politically unfashionable past--its entanglement with the market, the canon, the cult of male genius? Why paint at all?--Rosanna McLaughlin "Art Agenda"
Whatever is incalculable, including the feeling of a mistake. I'd like to see the diagram of that. Failure and dread. That's why I still loved abstraction, because we knew it didn't work, that it was a failure, a paradox, a realm of both potential and unchartability [...]That's what a good diagram indicates: that there are things beyond control.--Amy Sillman "Paris Review"
Best known for her large-scale gestural paintings, Amy Sillman has her illustrations and essays foregrounded in this title. Cartoons, drawings and portraits sit alongside written pieces ranging from queer readings of abstract expressionism to the role of the body in making art. Says Sillman: it's about that "moment of tension between the ideal and the real, where what's supposed to happen goes awry... That tension is what abstraction is partly about: the subject no longer entirely in control of the plot".--Baya Simons "Financial Times"
Sillman's writing is mordantly funny and precise. Faux Pas features passionate arguments on John Chamberlain, Eugène Delacroix, Rachel Harrison and Laura Owens - each a delight to read. Sillman doesn't consider herself a critic so much as an appreciator of art, inserting herself only when she feels she can add to the conversation, overturning and examining the problems to which others have failed to pay sufficient attention.--Tausif Noor "Frieze"
