Rindon Johnson

These essays together are a wonderful mental embrace. Sillman’s voice is cool, patient, incessant, vulnerable, nostalgic, hilarious; actually what's the word for when someone is kind, clear, sharp and opaque all at once? Someone who speaks straight from the shoulder? Or maybe the elbow: I think Sillman is speaking from the hand in that the ligaments joining feeling and action are lovingly prodded. She is explicit, she’s serious in that she isn’t always that serious, but she’s serious, she’s plain, direct, I mean, I hung on her words.

Jutta Koether

These dispatches from a decidedly un-straight thinker – a mind that IS an artist’s studio with a sustained curiosity as her main medium – is an exuberant, massively heterogeneous, exhilarating bundle of texts, diagrams, drawings, that document, activate and irritate. With a never-ending love for time space complications Amy Sillman insists on an informed openness, and shows us her tools.

Eileen Myles

Amy Sillman tells us that a tube of cadmium red has a different weight than say cobalt violet and that all painters know this and art historians mostly don’t. Sillman is shocked to think about someone who beholds paint but has never held it and she stands in the doorway of that thought, bleeding back and forth and she writes in it & it’s a rare rare place she’s standing in. Pick up her Faux Pas. You’ll be dazzled as I am by this knowledge, her rarity.

Bookforum

Bookforum Editors

Brainy, gregarious, and often hilarious texts...

Hilton Als

Amy Sillman's richness of personality and world view shines so beautifully throughout "Faux Pas," that it becomes a kind of illumination, lighting the reader's way through a world of ideas and language and images no one but Sillman, in all her brilliance, could have produced. A generous triumph.

New York Times

Jason Farago

Indeed Ms. Sillman is in a thin crowd (with, let’s say, Andrea Fraser, Hito Steyerl, Matias Faldbakken, David Salle) of artists who can really write. The evidence is in “Faux Pas,” a just-published collection — her fourth — of her writings that display the same good humor and intelligence of her best paintings.

Art Agenda

Rosanna McLaughlin

Faux Pas comprises seventeen texts written for journals, zines, and lectures between 2009 and 2020 [...]The book asks, and often answers by example: How to talk about painting today? How to reckon with its politically unfashionable past—its entanglement with the market, the canon, the cult of male genius? Why paint at all?

Financial Times

Baya Simons

Best known for her large-scale gestural paintings, Amy Sillman has her illustrations and essays foregrounded in this title. Cartoons, drawings and portraits sit alongside written pieces ranging from queer readings of abstract expressionism to the role of the body in making art. Says Sillman: it’s about that “moment of tension between the ideal and the real, where what’s supposed to happen goes awry… That tension is what abstraction is partly about: the subject no longer entirely in control of the plot”.

Paris Review

Amy Sillman

Whatever is incalculable, including the feeling of a mistake. I’d like to see the diagram of that. Failure and dread. That’s why I still loved abstraction, because we knew it didn’t work, that it was a failure, a paradox, a realm of both potential and unchartability [...]That’s what a good diagram indicates: that there are things beyond control.

Frieze

Tausif Noor

Sillman’s writing is mordantly funny and precise. Faux Pas features passionate arguments on John Chamberlain, Eugène Delacroix, Rachel Harrison and Laura Owens – each a delight to read. Sillman doesn’t consider herself a critic so much as an appreciator of art, inserting herself only when she feels she can add to the conversation, overturning and examining the problems to which others have failed to pay sufficient attention.