Amy Sillman: Oh, Clock!

The Kunstmuseum Bern is showing the first major institutional solo exhibition of American painter Amy Sillman (b. 1955) in Europe.

Sillmans works include drawings, prints and texts, as well as objects and animations. Her quick serial drawings and multi-layered paintings move deftly between abstraction and figuration—now they are multicoloured, now monochrome, now they show complex forms, now figures or body parts. And they are always filled with delight in painting.

Images × words
Sillman’s background in illustration and her affinity for language and writing have become an integral part of her art. Her works take their bearings from traditional formats such as landscape and portrait, and from concepts such as abstraction or cartoons, but also from the fascination with the emergence of form during the painting process, which she explores experimentally.

The enthusiasm and care with which she paints, speaks and thinks about painting, are apparent both in her writings and in her many teaching assignments, as well as in the way she looks at art and the presentation of her works.

The artist probes the roles of the figurative, of cartoon-like styles and abstraction, always driven by the question of whether something abstract can convey emotions, and whether a language can even form out of it. This is apparent, for example, in the over 200 drawings of the series UGH for 2023 (Words / Torsos) on show at the Kunstmuseum Bern. But Sillman’s preoccupation with painting does not stop when she sets down her brush. She makes digital animations which, like her series of paintings, document the development of the abstract forms, imitate the dynamic of the process of composition and at the same time prompt emotions while often reproducing comical stories.

“I always cut, ruin, dub over, erase, add, scrape, bring back, continue, reverse. The digital just gave me a useful tool in being able to go both forward and backward in time [… ] not just accumulatively forward as in a painted surface.” —Amy Sillman

At the same time Sillman is reflecting on world events, as in the series of Election Drawings, which was made in 2016 after the electoral victory of Donald Trump. Taking inspiration from protest placards, Sillman is concerned with the emotions which call people to action at such a moment, but which also render one incapable of acting.

Oh, Clock!: about the exhibition
Amy Sillman’s powerful and allusive work is presented at the Kunstmuseum Bern with selected groups of works from the past fifteen years. The exhibition includes three series of drawings encompassing between 70 and 400 drawings, some 30 paintings and five animated films. Co-curated with the artist, it is marked by deliberate encounters between densely composed paintings and extensive series of drawings, object-like series of prints, video works with poetic soundtracks, wall-paintings, animations and installation-style interventions. These include the monumental work Untitled (Frieze for Venice) which Sillman made for the Venice Biennale in 2022.

The exhibition demonstrates how strongly Sillman tends to work within the space and in a space-related way: she alters the architecture with unfamiliar displays, she blurs the spatial structure through painting and calls the boundaries of the image into question. Through the unusual form of presentation of her paintings and drawings, she undermines expectations of a conventional painting exhibition, and brings the creative process into the foreground.

Amy Sillman × Kunstmuseum Bern
As a special extra, Amy Sillman involves works from the collection of the Kunstmuseum Bern in her exhibition, thus establishing a dialogue with her own works. In this way, from her viewpoint she questions the established patterns and relative weightings in art history. She does not allow herself to be constrained by such categories as canon or history, but skilfully uses narrative and pictorial languages to suggest a new vision of connections: she does not group works chronologically or thematically, but rather by forms, colours, compositions or very personal sensations. So, for example, next to well-known paintings by Augusto Giacometti she also hangs small-format drawings by Louise Bourgeois, which she juxtaposes with her own works, staging them with artistic vision.

Cooperation
The exhibition is a cooperation between the Kunstmuseum Bern and Ludwig Forum Aachen. It has been developed by Kathleen Bühler (Kunstmuseum Bern) and Eva Birkenstock (Ludwig Forum Aachen) together with the artist.