One ambiguous figure appears to break into multiple forms in Amy Sillman’s irresistible ‘Split 3,’ shifting to the side as if to walk off the canvas. Dominant yellow, green and red colors draw the eye back into the painting’s depths but thick, dark horizontal lines of paint block the viewer’s journey. Coming and going, inviting and refusing, in motion yet static, the contradictions in the canvas reward pondering. (On view in Chelsea at Gladstone Gallery through Nov 14th.)
“I don’t care about beauty at all,” New York painter Amy Sillman has declared about the imperfect figures and heavily worked canvas of her paintings. Recent works at Sikkema Jenkins & Co are titled after the German word for metabolism, a nod to the process of changing paint into images that land provocatively between abstraction and figuration, suggesting both bodies and furniture in a color palette that simultaneously soothes and excites. (In Chelsea through March 12th).
