Amy Sillman “After Metamorphoses”

The Drawing Center

[Image: Amy Sillman, Score for After Metamorphoses, 2015–16. Graphite on paper, 1 of 2 pages. Courtesy of the artist.]

This event has ended.

The Lab

For her exhibition at The Drawing Center, Amy Sillman will present an animated video entitled After Metamorphoses, a work based on Ovid’s epic narrative poem that she began during a 2015 fellowship at the American Academy in Rome. To create the video, Sillman overlaid abstract drawings (which she worked on in a bathtub in Berlin) with iPad sketches that precisely follow the sequence of changes that occur in Ovid’s fifteen-book narrative. Set to a score by the Berlin-based musician Wibke Tiarks, the film features a variegated background that flashes beneath a series of figures as they transform one into another with a temporal rhythm. In After Metamorphoses, Sillman exercises the possibility of endless change, a theme first developed in her animated works and that continues to inform her paintings and drawings. Her adaptation of Ovid is one of a number of works that Sillman has made in collaboration with poets, including Lisa Robertson and Charles Bernstein, among others. In tandem with the exhibition, Sillman will create a limited edition zine, the 11th in her series of zines entitled O.G. Curated by Claire Gilman, Senior Curator.

Born in Detroit in 1955, New York-based artist Amy Sillman has been showing her mercurial drawings, paintings, and animations since the early 1980s. In recent years, solo exhibitions of Sillman’s work have been presented at Kunsthaus Bregenz in Austria; Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston; Hirschhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, DC; Blaffer Art Museum at the University of Houston; and the Institute of Contemporary Art at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia. Sillman’s work has also been included in recent group exhibitions at the Hammer Museum of Art in Los Angeles; Whitney Museum of American Art in New York; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; The Museum of Modern Art in New York; Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles; and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, among others.