Amy Sillman at the Hirshhorn, part two

Picking up from yesterday (part three here)...

Amy Sillman layers paint over layers of paint the way Richard Diebenkorn did. Sometimes she loads up her brush like Park, Bischoff or other Bay Area School types. She shmears wet paint across a canvas like Gerhard Richter. Sometimes she dabs it on almost tentatively, as Guston did in his great Turneresque abstractions.

Then there are the compositions themselves. Her diagonals reject a painter's tendency to grid, the same way Diebenkorn's did circa Ocean Park. This one recalls Lee Bontecou's delicate, small hanging sculptures from 1967. A green, red and gray section on the right-hand side of I (2008, below) seems informed by those atmospheric Gustons. The vaguely cartoony shapes in several of the paintings here (including this one) abstract Carroll Dunham's body parts. And Sillman's stitching together of seemingly disparate swatches of sometimes garish color and pattern recall 1980s David Hockney. Sillman's rejection of a traditional, harmonious, palette reminds me of of abstraction from about that period, including Howard Hodgkin, Jonathan Lasker and Thomas Nozkowski.

There are no shortage of sources in Sillman's paintings. While many abstract artists love to hide the quarries they mined -- such as how Clyfford Still spent decades denying and hiding the influence of landscape on his art -- Sillman flaunts hers. Like many painters who came of artistic age in the 1980s (Sillman first showed her paintings in NYC in 1982), Sillman has grappled with the history of American post-war abstraction. Instead of running away from it, she's cleverly chosen bits and pieces to embrace and incorporate. (The painters she's rejected stand out just as loudly: Her paintings include none of David Reed's finish, Joan Mitchell's free-fall, or Still's disdain for brushiness.)

What you think of Sillman's paintings probably depends on whether you think that riffing on abstraction, incorporating different strains of it, challenging it, and mixing it up is a worthwhile pursuit, or if abstract painting was good enough the first time or two (or three). I think Sillman's paintings make a strong case that abstract art is still fertile ground for painters today. They're exciting, hopeful.

The Hirshhorn show, curated by the Hirsh's Anne Ellegood and the Tang's Ian Berry, shows 11 Sillman oil paintings from 2007 and 2008, along with 12 ink-on-paper drawings (all from 2007). The show's set-up is straightforward: Sillman started with a dozen drawings of friends and abstracted them into paintings. The Hirshhorn almost bludgeons visitors with this point: The museum built a temporary wall just inside the entrance to the gallery that holds Sillman's paintings; A viewer can't avoid seeing the works on paper before advancing 'inside' to see the oil paintings.

The point of the exercise is to reinforce the archeology of Sillman's paintings: Look! They're rooted in figures! That's fine. But I'm much more interested in the other roots.