Don’t Miss: Amy Sillman

“I was a late bloomer,” says the New York painter Amy Sillman, whose museum survey “Amy Sillman: One Lump or Two” is on view at Boston’s Institute of Contemporary Art on October 3 through January 5, 2014. “When I was in art school, my friends thought painting was dead. Everyone was into video and performance, but I was still developing my own response to painting.” Known for riotous and seemingly silly canvases (Elephant, 2005) that riff on Abstract Expressionist titans like Philip Guston and Willem de Kooning, Sillman has never been a slave to art-world trends. She has lately turned to bigger, bolder pieces, but for her, a finished painting is still about the years of effort beneath the surface. “The viewer only gets to see the top layer,” she says. “But my work isn’t really about anything other than the process of change.”

Image: Collection Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art, photograph by Gene Ogami