Commitment to Abstraction and Color as Primary Language

Deanna Sirlin’s art is rooted in abstraction, with a pronounced commitment to color as both subject and vehicle of meaning. Across paintings, installations, and media-based works, she foregrounds chromatic experience rather than figuration or narrative. Her palette tends toward saturated, luminous hues that engage viewers’ perceptual faculties—stimulating intuitive and emotional responses. This relates to a lineage of modern abstraction that privileges the phenomenology of color and post-painterly abstraction but with a distinct contemporary sensitivity to materiality and environment.

In gallery works like Variation (2019), critics observed her mastery of color relationships and the way layers of pigment build intense surfaces that pulsate with light and energy.

 

Expansion Beyond Painting: Installation and Architecture
Sirlin’s work becomes most critically interesting when she transcends the conventional boundaries of painting to engage entire environments. Her large-scale window installations—such as Retracings at the High Museum of Art and Borders of Light and Water in Venice—activate architectural space and transform spectators’ bodily experience of color and light.

These installations are not decorative; they interrogate the relationship between artwork, space, and viewer. By embedding colored transparencies into existing structural frameworks, Sirlin makes architecture a “silent partner” in the work, insisting that context and environment are inseparable from aesthetic encounter. One critique could be that the works at times prioritize spectacle over conceptual coherence—that is, the shifting light and vivid hues can overwhelm analytical engagement. Yet this sensory richness is precisely where her art’s power lies.

A feminist art panel described her approach as refusing medium specificity, a critical condition in contemporary art theory. Rather than preserving the purity of painting, she blends materials and disciplines—inviting a post-medium dialogue that resonates with Rosalind Krauss’s theorization of contemporary practice.

Process, Technology, and the Body
Sirlin’s process bridges traditional paint gestures with digital and mechanical reproduction. Sirlin recontextualizes her work into architectural formats.

This hybrid method foregrounds a tension between the handmade and the mediated. On one hand, her brushwork retains evidence of bodily presence; on the other hand, the final execution involves technological translation, raising questions about authenticity and mediation in art. The artist’s own statements suggest she sees this interplay not as dilution but as a necessary evolution of painting in the digital age.

Engagement with Place, Time, and Environment
Critically, Sirlin’s installations often engage specific locales and temporal conditions. In Venice, Borders of Light and Water references the flickering reflections of the Grand Canal and climate vulnerability. The work’s chromatic shifts through the day evoke the passage of time and the mutable nature of environment, tying aesthetic experience to ecological awareness.

 

This theme is more suggestive than explicit, the work’s immersion in natural light and context animates a dialogue about space, place, and impermanence—an increasingly urgent conversation.

 

Historical Lineage and Contemporary Positioning
Sirlin’s deep grounding in art history—evident in her writings—situates her within a network of influences ranging from Abstract Expressionism to post-war color field developments. Her reflections on artists and art history in The Art Section journal, reinforce her position as a practitioner who is both artist and critic. Her writings enriches the viewers understanding of her work with intellectual context.

 

Sensory immersion: Her use of vivid color and light creates compelling perceptual experiences that actively involve the viewer.

Spatial dynamism: Sirlin’s installations rethink how art interacts with architectural space and public environments.

Theoretical engagement: Her rejection of medium purity aligns with contemporary critical discourse on art’s expanding boundaries.

Deanna Sirlin’s art occupies a vibrant intersection of color theory, material experimentation, spatial transformation, and conceptual inquiry. Her ability to translate painterly concerns into immersive installations reflects both a historical consciousness and a forward-looking negotiation of medium as her work powerfully reasserts its relevance in an era attentive to light, environment, and embodied experience.