Artist Amy Sillman presents new works in Tang Opener

Amy Sillman?s new show at the Tang Museum, Third Person Singular (July 19, 2008?Jan. 4, 2009) will feature drawings and paintings inspired by the human figure, the psychological aspects of couplehood, and the presence of the artist as a third-party onlooker.

The highly regarded New York artist typically uses lyrical color and startling geometries to push familiar formats like landscape, portraiture, and abstraction into unexpected new dimensions. In Third Person Singular, she delves deeper into abstraction, pulling architectural forms and bold juxtapositions of color from a somewhat unlikely source: life-drawing sessions.

For the past few years, Sillman has made simple, black-ink sketches of couples, many of them close friends. ?Couples usually sit in more complicated ways if they have already been intimate with each other,? she explains. Those complicated, intertwined intimacies suggest a world of new shapes, planes, and gestures that Sillman explores first in additional versions drawn from memory and then in paintings that she reworks until she finds ?something that feels surprising.? Zingy with brilliant color and sharp edges, the paintings in Third Person Singular transform portraits of couples into enticing and psychologically weighted landscapes of color and shape.

Tang Museum public events scheduled to accompany the exhibition will include an opening reception 6?7:30 p.m. Saturday, July 19, celebrating all four summer exhibitions, including three already on view: Opener 14: Dean Snyder: Almost Blue (through Aug. 31), Things Remain (through Sept. 7), and Elevator Music 12: Jessica Rylan: Imaginary Bridge (through Sept. 20). A curator?s tour of Third Person Singular will begin at noon on Tuesday, July 29.

Sillman?s work has been exhibited in the U.S. at the 2004 Whitney Biennial, the Brooklyn Museum, and the Institute of Contemporary Art in Philadelphia, among others, and has been shown abroad in London, Germany, and Italy. Her numerous awards and fellowships include the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship in Painting, the Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation Award, the Joan Mitchell Foundation Fellowship, the Pollock-Krasner Foundation Fellowship and a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in Painting. Third Person Singular was co-organized by the Tang Museum and the Smithsonian?s Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, D.C.