Amy Sillman

Amy Sillman was born in 1955 in Detroit, Michigan. She moved to New York intending to study Japanese, first at New York University, before shifting toward art. She also spent time at Beloit College in Wisconsin. She completed a BFA at the School of Visual Arts in 1979, and returned to school around age forty for an MFA from Bard College, completed in 1995.

Her paintings, often built across multiple panels and reworked over long periods, move between abstraction and cartoonish figuration, incorporating drawing, animation, and zine-making alongside painting. An early institutional solo presentation, Procession, opened at the Institute of Contemporary Art at the University of Pennsylvania in 2004. A first major museum survey, Third Person Singular, followed at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in 2008. The traveling exhibition one lump or two originated at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston in 2013 and moved in 2014 to the Aspen Art Museum and the Center for Curatorial Studies at Bard College, the same year her work appeared in the Whitney Biennial.

In 2019 the Museum of Modern Art invited her to curate a selection from its own collection for the exhibition Artist's Choice: Amy Sillman, The Shape of Shape, which remained on view into 2020. In 2022 she took part in The Milk of Dreams, the International Exhibition of the 59th Venice Biennale curated by Cecilia Alemani. Amy Sillman: Oh, Clock! was presented at Ludwig Forum Aachen in 2025. A survey of her monotype practice, Amy Sillman: Alternate Side (Permutations #1 to 32), opened at Dia Bridgehampton in mid-2025 and remains on view into 2026. She lives and works in New York.

Critics have followed Sillman's career as a sustained argument for painting's continued relevance, tracing a line from her early institutional shows in the 2000s through the Hirshhorn survey in 2008 and the traveling one lump or two in 2013 to 2014. Writers have repeatedly focused on the friction in her work between clumsiness and control, and on her insistence that abstraction can carry humor, doubt, and autobiography rather than pure formal resolution. Her invitation to curate MoMA's own collection in 2019 and her inclusion in the 2022 Venice Biennale are generally read by critics as confirmation that her once-marginal position, mixing drawing, animation, and painting, has become central to how contemporary abstraction is discussed.

Sillman's auction record is Junker 1, a painting from 2009 to 2010 that sold for USD 984,250 at Sotheby's New York on 15 November 2023, breaking a previous artist record of USD 870,000 set in 2021. Market trackers describe roughly two decades of cumulative auction activity in the low eight figures, a modest but steadily built secondary market relative to her museum standing. In early 2026 David Zwirner announced it now represents her, joining the Berlin gallery Capitain Petzel, a signal that her primary market is consolidating around larger, more internationally connected galleries after years with smaller representation.

There is no published catalogue raisonne for Sillman, so collectors should rely on documentation from her current galleries, David Zwirner and Capitain Petzel, when confirming provenance. Her auction market is comparatively thin, with a record set as recently as November 2023, so individual sale results should be read against a small pool of comparable transactions rather than a long price history. Her recent move to David Zwirner, alongside continuous museum programming through 2026, points toward a market that is still adjusting upward to match her institutional reputation, but collectors should treat any single auction result with the caution appropriate to a market with few repeat sales.