In Conversation: Molly Warnock with Amy Sillman and David Reed

Join Timothy Taylor for a conversation with curator and writer Molly Warnock, along with painters Amy Sillman and David Reed inside 'To continue painting’: James Bishop and New York, an exhibition showcasing James Bishop’s paintings—his first solo presentation in New York in over a decade. The conversation will delve into Bishop's innovative approach to abstraction, his influence on contemporary painting, and how his work continues to resonate within the broader context of modern art.

5:30pm: doors open, 6pm: talk begins

Left to right: Amy Sillman, Molly Warnock, and David Reed

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Amy Sillman (b. 1955, Detroit) is renowned for complex process-based paintings and drawings, both intuitive and analytical, and for an expansive body of adjacent pursuits that include printing, animation, writing, curating, and large-scale site-specific projects. She infuses abstraction with humor, formal, and conceptual questions, and always a rigorous physicality. In her current show at DIA/Bridgehampton "Alternate Side (Permutations #1-32)", on view until May 2025, she treats the room itself as a substrate for a silkscreen-based installation. Recent exhibitions include Oh, Clock! at Kunstmuseum Bern, Switzerland (2024–25), and the Ludwig Forum Aachen, Germany (2024–25), where she also curated the two museums' collections, and hung them on own hand-painted walls. In 2019, she curated The Shape of Shape in the Artist’s Choice series at the Museum of Modern Art, New York. Sillman also regularly publishes her writing on art; her book Faux Pas: Selected Writings and Drawings (2020) is now in its fourth reprint. Sillman was the co-chair of the MFA Painting program at Bard College, Annandale-On-Hudson, New York, from 1997 to 2013 and a Professor at the Städelschule, Frankfurt, from 2015 to 2019. She now lives and works in New York.

David Reed (b. San Diego, 1946) lives in New York City. His paintings develop from an obsession with how we see and a deep interest in European and American paintings, ranging from the Italian Renaissance and the European Baroque to Abstract Expressionism, Pop Art, and Minimalism. To make his paintings, he combines techniques and concepts used in older traditions of figure painting with new expressive and philosophical questions made possible by abstraction. In order to test our perceptions, Reed’s paintings combine disparate elements: For example, hand-painted brush and knife marks appear alongside images of such marks painted using computer generated, laser-cut stencils based on digitally processed scans. His most recent solo exhibitions include shows at Gagosian Gallery, Basel (2022) and NY (2020 and 2017); Neues Museum Nürnberg, Germany (2019); Kunstmuseum Winterthur, Switzerland (2018); Pérez Art Museum, Miami, Florida (2016); Museum Haus Lange, Krefeld, Germany (2015).

Molly Warnock is a widely published art historian and critic. Her most recent essay on James Bishop’s painting, entitled “Portraits of No One: Bishop, Rembrandt, Genet,” will appear in Journal of Contemporary Painting and (in French translation) in the Cahiers du Musée National d’Art Moderne in winter 2025-26. The author of the monographs Simon Hantaï and the Reserves of Painting (Pennsylvania State University Press, 2020) and Penser la Peinture. Simon Hantaï (Gallimard, 2012), she has also written on modern and contemporary art for, among other journals, Artforum, Art in America, Tate Papers, and nonsite, and for numerous edited volumes and exhibition catalogues. Recent editorial projects include four volumes for the bilingual French-English Transatlantique collection (ER Publishing), on Martin Barré, Simon Hantaï, James Bishop, and Michel Parmentier. At Timothy Taylor, New York, she previously curated Simon Hantaï: Unfolding (2024). Since 2022, she is Director of the Clyfford Still Catalogue Raisonné Project at the Clyfford Still Museum in Denver, Colorado, where she oversees the preparation of the painter's five-volume Complete Works and related research, curatorial, and publishing initiatives.

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