For this installation, ICA has invited Amy Sillman (b. 1956, Chicago, Illinois; lives New York, New York) to do a large wall-work. Sillman paints according to an idiosyncratic method of post-Surrealist, latter day Chicago Funk School, stream-of-consciousness. At once figurative, decorative, narrative and abstract, her paintings channel a voracious and noodling intelligence about “anything intimate,” including Italian fresco painting, Indian miniature painting, the films of Douglas Sirk, the surfaces of Abstract Expressionist painting, poetry, and television. Indeed, Sillman has described her work as “partly cartoon, partly lament, partly grudge.”

Amy Sillman is a “painting lover’s painter” (Peter Schjeldahl, Village Voice, 1998). Her work has been widely exhibited since the early 1980s in group shows around the world. She is a founder of the artist-run gallery Four Walls, in Brooklyn, New York; Milton Avery Professor in the Arts at Bard College; and a 2001–2002 recipient of a Guggenheim Foundation fellowship.