Amy Sillman (b. 1955, Detroit, United States) is a New York–based painter and drawer whose practice has played a defining role in the evolution of contemporary abstraction. Working across painting, drawing, printmaking, animation, and writing, she develops a process-driven approach in which form, revision, and material experimentation remain in constant flux. Her work is characterised by an open-ended negotiation between gesture and structure, figuration and abstraction, humour and formal rigour.
Sillman’s practice foregrounds painting as a temporal and analytical process, often incorporating layering, erasure, and visible revision as structural elements of the image. Alongside her paintings, her drawings and zines extend her investigation into diagrammatic thinking and the instability of visual meaning, positioning her work at the intersection of abstraction, language, and cognition.
Her work has been the subject of major institutional exhibitions in the United States and Europe, and is held in leading public collections including the Museum of Modern Art (New York), the Whitney Museum of American Art, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles. Recent presentations have included significant survey exhibitions and focused presentations across major international institutions, reaffirming her status as one of the most influential painters of her generation.