Digital Guide Amy Sillman | Kunstmuseum Bern

Introduction

The American painter Amy Sillman (*1955) is an influential voice in contemporary painting. Her body of work encompasses drawings, prints, and texts, together with objects and animations. An unequivocal commitment to processes of transformation, reversal, conceiving anew, and revision epitomizes Sillman’s painterly explorations. Her serial drawings and multi-layered paintings move skillfully between abstraction and figuration – sometimes multi-colored, while on other occasions monochrome, at times featuring complex forms, and at others figures or body parts. But they are always full of the joy in painting.

Amy Sillman has been working on the tenets of the medium of painting since the early 1990s. Her artistic development remains influenced by the New York of the 1970s and ongoing political tensions between visual and linguistic forms of expression. While painting was being criticized as a “commercial” medium, Sillman took inspiration from a previous generation of groundbreaking painters, who had pursued a non-commercial, abstract-based practice. Her robust and expressive visual language makes repeated reference to art history, including such painters and sculptors as Jacob Lawrence, Philip Guston, Lee Krasner, Joan Mitchell, Eva Hesse, Nancy Spero, Elizabeth Murray, Nicolas Moufarrege, Ida Applebroog, and Jack Whitten. At the same time, she was, and still remains, close to both experimental writing and film.

Sillman has succeeded in revitalizing Abstract Expressionism by moving seamlessly between different media and incorporating such elements as collage, drawing, and printmaking into her practice. Her work draws on art historical references, particularly post-war American gestural painting, which she employs as both an influence and contradistinction. The artist explores the feminist critiques of notions such as mastery, genius, and power that have enabled her to introduce such qualities as humor, awkwardness, self-deprecation, affect, and doubt into her practice. Amy Sillman has spent the past three decades questioning the language and practice of painting, reassessing its history, but also extending it employing new mechanical and digital processes.

Oh, Clock!: on the exhibition

Amy Sillman’s powerful and evocative oeuvre is being presented in selected groups of works from the last fifteen years. Drawing on her explorations of the history of the medium, her complex painterly methods both on and beyond the canvas, her research-based writing practice, her engagement with museum collections, and her international teaching, the exhibition Oh, Clock! provides a range of insights into Sillman’s approach to painting and, as the title suggests, her interest in painting as a time-based medium.

The presentation includes around thirty paintings and three hundred works on paper, several digital animations, as well as site-specific installations. It has been conceived as a large-scale installation of differing modes of work that all address the aspect of time. Co-curated with the artist, the exhibition is informed by targeted encounters between densely composed paintings and extensive drawing series, object-like groups of prints, video works accompanied by poetic soundtracks, wall paintings, animations, and interventions in the form of installations.

Time

Images and Words

Figuration and Abstraction

Drawing and Practice

Presentation and Display

Biography

Amy Sillman was born in Detroit in 1955 and now lives in New York. She is renowned for her process-based paintings that move between abstraction and figuration as well as an oeuvre encompassing such unusual media as animation, zines, and installation. During recent decades Sillman’s rigorous practice and writing has significantly influenced the discipline of painting.

Sillman moved from Detroit to New York in the 1970s to attend a course in Japanese studies, but shifted to art, earning a BFA from the School of Visual Arts in 1979, where she became deeply involved in ongoing debates about the future viability of contemporary painting. She joined the feminist and counterculture movements, becoming an assistant to artist Pat Steir as well as a member of and contributor to the feminist journal Heresies. Sillman earned an MFA from Bard College in 1995 and joined the school’s art faculty in 1996. She taught in Bard’s MFA painting program from 1997 to 2013, and served as chair of the painting department from 2002 to 2013. In recent years, Sillman has written extensively about her own art as well as the works of other artists.

A comprehensive presentation of the artist’s paintings on paper was on display in the exhibition The Milk of Dreams, curated by Cecilia Alemani at the 59^th Biennale di Venezia. Sillman has exhibited worldwide in major international institutions, including solo exhibitions at Arts Club of Chicago (2019); Camden Arts Center, London (2018); and Kunsthaus Bregenz (2015), as well as in group exhibitions at Lenbachhaus, Munich (2018); Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (2016); Tate Modern, London (2015); and MoMA, New York (2015). The first museum survey of her work one lump or two, curated by Helen Molesworth, opened in 2013 at the Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston. Her work is represented in numerous museum collections in the USA and Europe, including MoMA, New York; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Tate Modern, London; Musée d’Art Moderne, Paris; Moderna Museet, Stockholm; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; Art Institute of Chicago; and Hammer Museum, Los Angeles. She recently curated an Artist’s Choice exhibition at MoMA titled The Shape of Shape that opened in 2019.