Nose Job, 2014/2015
Information about the artwork
- MaterialOil on canvas
- Dimensions190.5 x 167.6 cm
- Year of acquisition2015
- Inventory numberUAB 922
- On viewOn view
- Copyright© Amy Sillman. Photo: Haydar Koyupinar, Bayerische Staatsgemäldesammlungen, Museum Brandhorst, Munich
More about the artwork
Before leaving for New York at the age of nineteen to study Japanese and later art, Amy Sillman grew up in Chicago. In the 1960s and 1970s, she became familiar with the work of a loose group of artists associated with the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, known as the Chicago Imagists. The influence of their grotesque-surrealist style, shaped by comic aesthetics, is evident in Sillman’s paintings, as is that of the figurative works by Philip Guston (1913-1980). In “Nose Job,” both the hand and the bulbous shape between its fingers—possibly the titular nose—evoke Guston’s influence. Beneath each of Sillman’s paintings, there are “a hundred other paintings,” as the artist herself puts it. She describes her process as one of continuous overpainting, scraping, and reconstructing—perhaps this is how her distinctive visual language emerges, one that resists confinement to a single stylistic definition as much as it defies any fixed interpretation of meaning. When asked why she insists on working alone and without assistants, despite the monumental scale of her canvases, the artist replies: “You can ask someone to paint something, but not to paint it out. If you paint a picture yourself, you can paint your own doubt.”
