Amy Sillman
Flowers for TZK, 2020
signed and numbered (lower left)
silkscreen and handwiping
45.7 x 30.5 cm.
Edition of 30 + 10 A.P.
Flowers for TZK, 2020
signed and numbered (lower left)
silkscreen and handwiping
45.7 x 30.5 cm.
Edition of 30 + 10 A.P.
Flowers for TZK, 2020
signed and numbered (lower left)
silkscreen and handwiping
45.7 x 30.5 cm.
Edition of 30 + 10 A.P.
“We were all completely thinking we were going to die...Never see our friends again, never see our families. We didn’t know what was going to happen. And spring was just carrying on!... even though there’s global warming and an eco-crisis, the flowers kept coming up. And the flowers were both funerary and joyous.”
Amy Sillman painted these floral still lifes at her Long Island retreat during the 2020 lockdown. “We were all thinking we were going to die, and spring was just carrying on”, says Sillman.
Photograph: Calla Kessler for The New York Times
The age of pandemic-induced lockdowns has confronted many artists with the challenge of continuing their production even as exhibitions, art fairs, and biennials are canceled until further notice. For Amy Sillman, whose work has been instrumental in expanding contemporary painting into media such as installation art, video, and magazines, 2020 brought unprecedented productivity. In the spring, as the virus began to spread and Sillman was temporarily unable to go to her painting studio in New York, she responded to the novel situation, which called for improvisation, by sitting at her kitchen table every morning and painting floral still lifes: a bouquet of peonies, a single sunflower hanging its head, or, as in her edition “Flowers for TzK” – a limited series of silkscreened works, each with a unique painted ground – a bundle of irises. Their gestural abstraction is a hallmark of Sillman’s work; the relation between foreground and background is deliberately rough, and the flowers’ colors and contours verge on the abstract.
As New York Times art critic Jason Farago has pointed out, the irises hark back to those of Vincent Van Gogh: “It was the first time I cried at a museum”, says Sillman, remembering the irises at the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam. “Because he was so tortured. The flowers were flowers of misery. Tears of dejection and tears of joy, which is what I was feeling, what all of us were feeling” (NYT, 8/11/20).
A collection of Sillman’s recent essays and graphic art, “Faux Pas: Selected Writings and Drawings,” was published by After 8 Books last fall. A complimentary copy of the book is included with this edition.