Amy Sillman: Oh, Clock!

Oh Clock! 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 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. Oh Clock! is curated by Kathleen Bühler with curatorial assistant Nina Liechti, and organized in collaboration with the Ludwig Forum Aachen.

Learn more about Oh Clock! at Kunstmuseum Bern.

Collection Intervention

For the occasion of this show, Amy Sillman also 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 curation. 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.

Learn more about the Collection intervention by Amy Sillman.