Amy Sillman. C, 2007; Oil on canvas; 45 x 39 inches. Collection of Gary and Deborah Lucidon. Photo: John Berens.

Her more recent abstract paintings (she’d say drawings), now on view at the ICA Boston, are certainly framed this way. Each is built up by forming an impulse, trying a layer, reversing it, repainting something new, rotating the painting, reacting to what is there, being surprised, drawing the thing again, and finally ending up with a ream of ideas painted in layers. The resultant painting is like seeing an entire novel or movie as one thing, at one time. They are born of inclusivity. They are filled with cellular veins of information; crowded swills of moments that incorporate their neighbors instead of disregard them.

Amy Sillman. Shade, 2010. Oil on canvas; 90 x 84 inches. Private collection. Photo: John Berens.

It’s so easy to see de Kooning, Guston, or other painters informing Sillman’s work, but that’s just not fair to her. Her work may resemble their works, but it does not rely on them. It’s the wrong question to ask of her. What we are seeing on the canvas is a result of formal uncertainties she confronted in the moment, even as she required her “body to lead her mind.” It is not a circumstance of her having one foot in an art history text. Sillman has struggled with the Abstract Expressionists’ legacy, and she has definitely appropriated parts of their practice. Instead, the similarities of her paintings to mid-century work make me want to redefine the AbEx painters. Were their paintings the results of similar visual doubts and playful discovery? Yes. To focus on their work as more of a result then a spiritual circumstance, redefines them. I find myself thinking they were really Abstract Compositionists under all the art historical spin.

Amy Sillman. # 841 (painting from print from animated drawing), 2012. Oil on canvas; 51 x 49 inches. Courtesy of the artist and Sikkema Jenkins & Co, NY. Photo: John Berens.

Sillman’s style is not formulaic. If anything, it is consciously inventive. She works very hard to encode these romans à clef. Hidden in her drawings are things that are not what they were when they inspired her, having been transformed. The abstractions that emerged from having two people sit together are a key example. I had no idea what inspired these paintings at first. They are concealed in physical twists of the canvas, camouflage, and overlays. Their referent is slurred and the resulting paintings are first-rate examples of painters being inspired by the mundane and being able to conceal it well.

Amy Sillman. Me and Ugly Mountain, 2003; Oil on canvas; 60 x 72 inches. Collection of Jerome and Ellen Stern. Photo: John Berens.

I’m not sure that Sillman’s compositions should be seen as finished or unfinished. They certainly reject the idea of being provisional. The various marks and layers are related to each other. The more recent paintings are the best evidence. The conscious layers of contrasting colors (blue/orange under yellow/purple) and the resultant subtle shifts of the resulting grays and browns cannot be anything less than deliberately alert work. What constitutes “finished” is, of course, subjective and reveals our expectations for painting, but the work should not be seen as accidents from an inexperienced hand.

Amy Sillman; N & O v3, 2006; Ink, colored pencil and gouache on paper; 17 x 14 inches. Courtesy of the artist and Sikkema Jenkins & Co NY. Photo: John Berens.

Sillman insists that her paintings are drawings and I can sympathize with her. There are plenty of other artists—painters, printmakers, sculptors—that were trained in their chosen medium but kept faithful to their true love, drawing. Where I want to quarrel with her though, is that this denies her painting chops. She’s a painter. She paints really well. Though her heart is devoted to drawing, now that curator Helen Molesworth has deliberated on her career via a retrospective, she should reconsider how much she says that she’s primarily a drafter. It’s pretty obvious that she has some serious painterly skills.

Amy Sillman. Shade, 1997-98; Oil and gouache on wood; 50 x 60 inches. Courtesy of the artist and Sikkema Jenkins & Co, NY. Photo: John Berens.

The assertion that these works are drawings is itself a political action, which creates a metaphysical tension. If painting is art’s apex predator, then drawing on an ipad is one of the ingredients for chum bait. Sillman has inverted the economic terms in this food pyramid by continuing to draw no matter her materials. These paintings do not fit in my tiny apartment and are not going to be found in a flatfile like works on paper. They do look good on the floor of an art fair. They look fantastic in a white walled museum with guards standing next to them. Her claim that she’s not an apex predator (a painter) and the comedy she uses to diffuse the authority found in her large and commanding paintings belie this show’s reality.

Amy Sillman: one lump or two, curated by Helen Molesworth, is on view at the ICA Boston through January 5, 2014. It will travel to the Aspen Art Museum from February 13 to May 11, 2014, and the Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College (CCS Bard) from June 28 to September 21, 2014.

Amy Sillman, Installation View "Thumb Cinema," courtesy Capitain Petzel, 2011

Amy Sillman’s new suite of paintings at Capitain Petzel are large and spatial, with an airiness well-suited to the glass paneled façade of her new Berlin gallery. Sillman’s latest canvasses still have the brute gestural force of a paint-conjured “id,” but also possess a kind of nimbleness and play alluded to in the exhibition’s title, Thumb Cinema.  Her palette is quiet, with lavender and forest greens evoking visions of British dales and naked Roccoco picnics.  A sense of solidity rarely appears in these works, replaced instead by misty shapes and raucous lines, which recall the rhythmic playfulness of Kandinsky or Mondrian.

The comic (in both senses of the word) aspects of Sillman’s paintings are belied by the massive size and scope of their Abstract Expressionist roots.  Sillman’s work is made more powerful because it diminishes the self-seriousness of AbEx, instead extolling the sensual, personal and indulgent mark.

Sillman gestures coyly towards the monolith of man-painting by digitally altering a Nancy cartoon for her exhibition poster.  In the cartoon we watch as the loveable girl scamp discovers a painter in the heady process of CREATING and then, duly impressed, offers him some (rather phallic) candy through a hole in the wall.

Although Sillman’s paintings sometimes read as the residue of an instinct-driven process, she is clearly an able draftsman who investigates the immediacy of mark with informed skill, giving primacy to whatever instrument she has on hand.  She underlines these corporeal interests by giving the paintings titles like TEETH and MOUTH among others.

The sensualized mark-as-body idea is made literal with three charcoal drawings that are more direct in their headless, mirrored figuration and recall Primitivist interpretations of the female form.  There is a brutality to these untitled works which, when taken with the pieces downstairs form a larger historical riff on the tropes of modernism.

Amy Sillman, Installation View "Thumb Cinema," courtesy Capitain Petzel, 2011

Alongside her paintings and charcoal drawings, Sillman presents a new animation titled Pinky’s Rule along with a room full of printed stills, specified to be sold only for the price required to make them; 43 dollars.  In recent shows Sillman has displayed zines, posters and CDs with her paintings, offering up a democratic gesture that implicitly contradicts the idea of painting as luxury totem.

Sillman’s animation, made on her iPhone is a departure in medium if not in visual language.  The stills from Pinky’s Rule are arrayed across a back room, covering almost all of the available wall space and blanketing the viewer in double bodies, eyes and orifices, blooming and spewing with joyous pixelated abandon and completing a pleasure-centric vision that feels whole and exciting.

Amy Sillman’s highly publicized split from abstraction may not be quite as dramatic as she made it sound in her sassy breakup letter on Bomblog in 2009.  To her credit, she was never a card-carrying member of the High Church of Abstraction anyway. I think some of the works in Transformer (or how many lightbulbs does it take to change a painting?), her current show at Sikkema Jenkins & Co., are in some ways more abstract than previous efforts. But it doesn’t really matter; labels are stupid.

I’m so sick of painters claiming Philip Guston as a forebear, but Sillman’s mixture of confessional cartooning and dark humor, which mirrors Guston’s notorious move away from abstraction in 1970, feels authentic. While Guston’s figurative intention seemed to elucidate the shades-drawn reclusiveness that he saw both in his artist-self and in the hooded figures of the KKK, Sillman seems to be growing more direct and open about her revelations than he ever was.

In a powerhouse group of new drawings, which are the first thing one encounters in this fairly extensive show, body parts stretch and mash together to create awkwardly structural forms that somehow explain the humor and futility of life, sex and art making. Hung in a tight grid, these works never get morbid or didactic—things are confidently upbeat and amoral.

If sex was the elephant in the room for Sillman’s 2007 show at Sikkema, then love may be lurking somewhere here.  Not the mature, late-in-life-walk-on-the-beach-type love, but lurid, new love. The type of love that makes you not care what your friends think if you’re a little too busy enjoying life to return their calls and texts like you did when you were single.

Some of the stuff in this show is intentionally nerdy. A second series of drawings takes a rather lengthy narrative spin around the creative process, ending with a drawing of a curlicue light bulb over what appears to be a cutesy self-portrait. A hand-scrawled note on the wall above a table of ‘zines says something like ‘zines $1 (honor system).”  The ‘zine itself is cool, but the writing on the wall seems desperately DIY. But so what?  We forgive these things of our friends who are in love. If they’re happy, so are we.

In a way, this entire show could be read as an earnest attempt to explore the erotic self as it intersects with technology and sensory perception. To this end, Sillman bets the house on old-fashioned painting, looking square in the face of trend shifts and technological advances. She makes a strong case.  While I’ve never been a fan of her adherence to old-school painting styles, with surfaces reminiscent of such un-hip practitioners as Richard Diebenkorn or Terry Winters (ack!), in these new paintings she somehow makes it all palatable.  It is refreshing to see an artist not give a shit about the whole digital effect on abstraction. Plus, by now we’ve learned that there really isn’t any one dominant medium or train of thought in painting.  Pitting abstraction against representation is ultimately counterproductive. Sillman’s public “breakup” with abstraction might be overstated, but the paintings are convincing enough that we don’t really care.