Untitled (Little Threesome), 2005

Oil on canvas
© Amy Sillman; courtesy the artist and Gladstone Gallery
Photo by John Berens.

Amy Sillman is best known for her oil paintings that draw inspiration from a diverse range of sources, including comics, Beat poetry, jazz, and Internet memes. In Sillman’s work, the body is an important subject, albeit an often invisible one. Rarely representing the figure in its entirety, the artist instead presents detached limbs or fragmented features, which emerge from clusters of abstract lines and passages of color. In Untitled (Little Threesome), Sillman also eroticizes the human body. Here the proliferation of rounded breast and elongated penile forms subtly suggests an intimate act under way.