Thomas Dane Gallery congratulates Magdalene A.N. Odundo and Amy Sillman on their invitations to the 59th International Art Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia curated by Cecilia Alemani.
Magdalene A. N. Odundo (b.1950) received her initial training as a graphic artist in her native Kenya. In 1971 she moved to the United Kingdom and enrolled on the foundation course at the Cambridge School of Art. In 1976 Odundo graduated in Ceramics, Photography and Printmaking from the University for the Creative Arts. Odundo completed her Post Graduate studies at the Royal College of Art in 1982. In 2019 Odundo was appointed Chancellor of the University for Creative Arts (UCA) and was made a Dame in the Queen’s New Year Honours list 2020.
Odundo's work is in the collections of many national and international museums including The British Museum, London; The Ashmolean Museum, Oxford; The Victoria and Albert Museum, London; The Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; The Brooklyn Museum, New York; National Museum of African Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington D.C.; Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles; Stedelijk Museum Voor Hedendaagst Kunst, Hertogenbosh, Netherlands and the Frankfurt Museum for Applied Arts, Frankfurt, Germany.
Amy Sillman (b.1955) is an artist based in New York since 1975. After studying Japanese language at New York University, she received a Bachelor of Fine Art in painting in 1979 at School of Visual Arts in New York City, and then a Master of Fine Art in painting at Bard College in 1995. While still an undergraduate in the 1970s, a teacher told Sillman that she had to “decide between” figuration and abstraction—ever since then, her work has been based on proving that binary (and others) wrong. Instead, she welcomes contradiction and dialectics into gestural painting procedures, working both fast, improvisationally, and slow, with a nearly-archaeological process of accumulation and redaction of innumerable layers. Over the past ten years, Sillman has added writing, curating, zine-making, animation, and site-specific installations to her practice. Her work is held in numerous private and public collections, including MoMA, the Whitney, MoCA LA, Tate Modern, the Brandhorst Museum/Munich, and the Moderna Museet/Stockholm. A mid-career travelling survey show "one lump or two," curated by Helen Molesworth, originated at the ICA Boston in 2013 and was accompanied by a monographic catalogue published by Prestel Books.
Besides her work as a painter, Sillman often writes on art, and her bibliography includes Faux Pas, a book of collected texts and drawings published in 2020 by After Eight Books in Paris. Her own work has been written about regularly in journals such as Artforum, Art News, Texte zur Kunst, and Frieze, and other publications.
