Landline. Amy Sillman, Camden Arts Centre

Amy Sillman’s solo show at the Camden Arts Centre opened in September, showcasing an exciting array of lively paintings and drawings. A contemporary painter, Sillman’s work is full of references to the abstract expressionist painters of the 1940s and 1950s, that’s not to say, however, that her work is purely abstract, as you can see a lot of influence from Philip Guston and perhaps even Richard Diebenkorn. This is particularly present in the process of observation that is then abstracted, and the cartoonish rendering of figures. The show has been given quite a few large nicely lit, immaculate rooms, a lot larger than I expected the Camden Arts Centre to provide. The works are presented in a delicate and pretty way, balancing in between the polished, protective ways of the big artist in a major gallery and the honest-to-material, tactile style that lets you enjoy the properties of the paper and cloth the works are painted on. The show starts with a big wall full of charcoal drawings, and progresses into a room of masterfully painted canvass-es, and then culminates with a set of works on paper suspended from a line hung across the large room at the back. Sillman’s work is energetic, playful, bright and hopeful. Shapes are slotted together satisfyingly, composition seeming to have been slaved over, line is ever present and ties together each piece. Fresh colours block out large areas of space, with white and black used very carefully and successfully to keep a balance in every rectangle of space. Her characters seems to sit in the perfect middle zone between the often boring and overly infantile drawings of Shrigley, and the ex-hausting rendering of many contemporary printmakers, Sillman managing to focus on attention to detail without sacri-ficing the life in the drawings. Something just feels right about these works, and as an artist I find them very inspiring. After visiting the exhibition I immediately wanted to get back into the studio and continue painting.