Amy Sillman.
Oh, Clock!


Amy Sillman is an important voice in contemporary painting and has consistently interrogated her medium since the 1990s. Her 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. However, Sillman's passion for art goes beyond paintings and invites us to take on new perspectives.

  • Exhibition view: Amy Sillman. Oh, Clock! Kunstmuseum Bern 2024
  • Exhibition view: Amy Sillman. Oh, Clock! Kunstmuseum Bern 2024
  • Exhibition view: Amy Sillman. Oh, Clock! Kunstmuseum Bern 2024
  • Exhibition view: Amy Sillman. Oh, Clock! Kunstmuseum Bern 2024
  • Exhibition view: Amy Sillman. Oh, Clock! Kunstmuseum Bern 2024
  • Exhibition view: Amy Sillman. Oh, Clock! Kunstmuseum Bern 2024
  • Exhibition view: Amy Sillman. Oh, Clock! Kunstmuseum Bern 2024
  • Exhibition view: Amy Sillman. Oh, Clock! Kunstmuseum Bern 2024
  • Exhibition view: Amy Sillman. Oh, Clock! Kunstmuseum Bern 2024
  • Exhibition view: Amy Sillman. Oh, Clock! Kunstmuseum Bern 2024
  • Exhibition view: Amy Sillman. Oh, Clock! Kunstmuseum Bern 2024
  • Exhibition view: Amy Sillman. Oh, Clock! Kunstmuseum Bern 2024

Amy Sillman. Oh, Clock!

(Part 1, first floor of the new wing)

Amy Sillman (*1955 in Detroit) is a New York based artist who works primarily with painting and drawing, approaching these mediums with a fresh eye and an expanded sense of material transformation. The artist works both analytically and improvisationally, combining a love of form with a rigorous editing process, and infecting painting with the complications of awkward feelings, humor, self-irony, and doubt. In doing so, she stages a larger essay about thinking inside abstraction, and constructs a radically open process of material transformation.

This exhibition presents selected groups of works from the past fifteen years, showcasing Sillman’s interest in the way painting can become drawing; drawing can become animation; animation becomes text; text returns to painting as handwriting. Seen here are over two dozen paintings, several collections of drawings, from groups of six to groups of over a hundred, digital animations and a room-size installation of hybrid printed and handmade work based on the idea of time unfolded as a cycle.

In all of these works, the artist’s attitude of do-it-yourself-ism punctuates the fixities of “high” abstraction. Hybridity is the standard operating procedure for Sillman, who has always crossed genres and systems. She embeds abstraction with figuration, borrows from cut-and-paste poetics, utilizes musical scores as conceptual instructions for painting, and employs a purposefully home-made kind of zine-making and video. In this exhibition, time itself becomes another material — packed into the body of painting’s frameworks and unfurled in its sequential choreography. The exhibition offers multifaceted insights into these engagements, in painting and beyond the canvas, as well as an anti-canonical approach to museum collections and display.

Sillman’s approach is both deeply thought-out and felt. She uncovers a kind of hidden visual history of the twentieth century that traces affective form. Her painting and her curatorial work invite us to expand our visual archives and to move beyond what is already known.

Curator: Kathleen Bühler
Curatorial assistant: Nina Liechti

The exhibition is being organised in collaboration with the Ludwig Forum Aachen.

  • Amy Sillman, Little Elephant, 2023, Öl und Acryl auf Leinwand, 129.5 x 124.5 cm  © Courtesy of the artist and Gladstone Gallery
  • Exhibition view: Amy Sillman. Oh, Clock! Kunstmuseum Bern 2024
  • Exhibition view: Amy Sillman. Oh, Clock! Kunstmuseum Bern 2024
  • Exhibition view: Amy Sillman. Oh, Clock! Kunstmuseum Bern 2024
  • Exhibition view: Amy Sillman. Oh, Clock! Kunstmuseum Bern 2024
  • Exhibition view: Amy Sillman. Oh, Clock! Kunstmuseum Bern 2024
  • Exhibition view: Amy Sillman. Oh, Clock! Kunstmuseum Bern 2024
  • Exhibition view: Amy Sillman. Oh, Clock! Kunstmuseum Bern 2024
  • Exhibition view: Amy Sillman. Oh, Clock! Kunstmuseum Bern 2024
  • Exhibition view: Amy Sillman. Oh, Clock! Kunstmuseum Bern 2024
  • Exhibition view: Amy Sillman. Oh, Clock! Kunstmuseum Bern 2024
  • Exhibition view: Amy Sillman. Oh, Clock! Kunstmuseum Bern 2024

Amy Sillman curates the Kunstmuseum Bern Collection

(Part 2, upper floor of the new wing)

For the occasion of this show, the artist has constructed a special installation chosen from the Kunstmuseum Bern’s collection. This includes a group of approximately 50 works, including paintings, prints, drawings and videos, with a few of Sillman’s own works embedded into this group. Guided by considerations of form, color, scale and site-specific relationships, Sillman has installed all of the works together against the activated ground of her own improvisatory wall paintings made on site specifically for this exhibition. Thus, she has re-thought abstraction not chronologically or thematically, but with a greater and more daring interweaving of epochs, continents and media, and between art objects and the architecture of the Kunstmuseum itself. 

On display are works by:
Etel Adnan, Esther Altorfer, Cuno Amiet, Hans Arp, Silvia Bächli, Monika Baer, Alice Bailly, Ericka Beckman, Christian Boltanski, Louise Bourgeois, Leidy Churchman, Rineke Dijkstra, Kees van Dongen, Piero Dorazio, Franz Eggenschwiler, Michaela Eichwald, Valie Export, Fischli/Weiss, Joel Fisher, Suzan Frecon, Pia Fries, Tatjana Gerhard, Augusto Giacometti, Thomas Hirschhorn, Alexej von Jawlensky, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Paul Klee, Jutta Koether, Käthe Kollwitz, Thomas Kovachevich, Lee Krasner, Alfred Kubin, Maria Lassnig, Fernand Léger, Otto Meyer-Amden, Auguste de Niederhäusern, Meret Oppenheim, Mai-Thu Perret, Sigmar Polke, Man Ray, Pamela Rosenkranz, Irene Schubiger, Kurt Seligmann, Amy Sillman, Nicolas de Staël, Sophie Taeuber-Arp, Amelie von Wulffen and Franz West.

Digital Guides

Discover the two parts of this exhibition with our Digital Guides:

Digital Guide: Amy Sillman. Oh, Clock!

Digital Guide: Amy Sillman curates the Kunstmuseum Bern Collection

Spring: Abstraction as ruin by Amy Sillman. With sound by Marina Rosenfeld
Comissioned and published by The Washington Post, March 18, 2024. Courtesy of The Washington Post

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