Faux Pas: Selected Writings and Drawings

Amy Sillman writes about painting the way she paints: fast, funny, impatient with the pieties that have settled over abstraction. Faux Pas is the book that made her one of the few artists whose prose is read for its own sake.

Published in Paris by After 8 Books and edited by Charlotte Houette, François Lancien-Guilberteau and Benjamin Thorel, with a foreword by Lynne Tillman, the collection gathers essays, reviews and lectures alongside drawings made specially for the volume, which run with the texts rather than illustrating them. This expanded edition adds four pieces (on Cézanne, Carolee Schneemann, Elizabeth Murray and Louise Fishman) plus a previously unpublished lecture on drawing and new work from 2020–22, including drawings from her installation for The Milk of Dreams at the 59th Venice Biennale. Sillman rereads Abstract Expressionism through a queer lens, argues for awkwardness and the body as working method, and takes up colour and shape as problems rather than properties.

Sillman (b. Detroit, 1955; lives in New York) has moved between painting, drawing, zines and animation since the 1980s, and her subjects here run from Delacroix to Maria Lassnig and Laura Owens. Faux Pas first appeared in 2020.