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Exhibition Archive

Amy Sillman: After Metamorphoses

January 20 – March 19, 2017

Amy Sillman, After Metamorphoses, 2015–16. Video animation with iPad drawings, 5 minutes, looped. Music by Wibke Tiarks. Courtesy of the artist. (film still)
Amy Sillman, Score for After Metamorphoses, 2015–16. Graphite on paper, 1 of 2 pages. Courtesy of the artist.
Amy Sillman, After Metamorphoses, 2015–16. Video animation with iPad drawings, 5 minutes, looped. Music by Wibke Tiarks. Courtesy of the artist. (film still)
Amy Sillman, After Metamorphoses, 2015–16. Video animation with iPad drawings, 5 minutes, looped. Music by Wibke Tiarks. Courtesy of the artist. (film still)
Amy Sillman, After Metamorphoses, 2015–16. Video animation with iPad drawings, 5 minutes, looped. Music by Wibke Tiarks. Courtesy of the artist. (film still)
Amy Sillman, After Metamorphoses, 2015–16. Video animation with iPad drawings, 5 minutes, looped. Music by Wibke Tiarks. Courtesy of the artist. (film still)

For her exhibition at The Drawing Center, Amy Sillman presents a video (or what she calls an animated drawing) entitled After Metamorphoses, a work based on Ovid’s epic narrative poem that she conceived in 2014 as a Resident at the American Academy in Rome. To create the video, Sillman overlaid abstract drawings (which were made in a bathtub in Berlin) with iPad sketches that precisely follow the sequence of changes that occur in Ovid’s fifteen-book narrative. Set to a score by the Berlin-based musician Wibke Tiarks, the video features a variegated background that flashes beneath a series of figures as they transform one into another with a temporal rhythm. In After Metamorphoses, Sillman exercises the possibility of endless change, a theme first developed in her animated works and that continues to inform her paintings and drawings. Her adaptation of Ovid is one of a number of works that Sillman has made in collaboration with poets, including Lisa Robertson and Charles Bernstein, among others. In tandem with the exhibition, Sillman has created a limited edition zine, the eleventh in her series of zines entitled O.G.

Organized by Claire Gilman, Senior Curator.

Amy Sillman

b. 1955, Detroit, MI

Lives and works in Brooklyn, NY

Amy Sillman (b. 1955) is a painter who has lived and worked in NYC since 1975. She earned her BFA in 1979 at SVA, and her MFA from Bard College in 1995. Sillman’s work is rooted in drawing, the process of improvisation, and to negotiating the terrain between things, e.g. the corporeal and the intellectual, figuration and abstraction, or the intimate scale of the hand versus a larger sense of meaning that unfurls across physical spaces. Her work is held in many private and public collections in the US and Europe, including MoMA, The Whitney, the Brandhorst Museum in Munich, the Moderna Museet in Stockholm, and The Tate Modern in London. A mid-career traveling survey show "one lump or two," curated by Helen Molesworth, originated at The ICA Boston in 2013 accompanied by a monograph. Her animation After Metamorphoses was created for The Drawing Center, and was on view in the winter/spring of 2017. Last fall Sillman curated the exhibition “The Shape of Shape” for MoMA’s re-opening, accompanied by a 'zine entitled “Shapes” produced for MoMA Magazine. Sillman is represented by Gladstone Gallery in NYC, where her current solo show “Twice Removed” will be on view until November 14th, 2020.

Installation Views

Credits

Amy Sillman: After Metamorphoses is made possible by the support of Jane Dresner Sadaka and Ned Sadaka, Sarah Peter, and Barbara Toll.

Past

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