In making the work, the collaborators went back and forth, toggling from image to poem and poem to image, so that it is impossible to say which came first. 

Earlier this year I posed a question to 12 admired painters: “What is the current state of abstraction?” The following is a collection of their responses, spanning the absurd, the analytical, and the visionary, all linked by an undercurrent of curiosity for the unknown.

Amy Sillman on the delirious tension between knowing and not-knowing in the paintings of Ellen Birkenblit, whose new work is on view at Anton Kern Gallery through March 30.

I don’t know what they mean, but blassive and glisstic, bloculate and perhaps indevalent are good words to describe Amy Sillman’s paintings.