Digital Guide Amy Sillman Sammlung

For the occasion of her show Oh, Clock!, the artist has constructed a special installation chosen from the Kunstmuseum Bern’s own collection. This includes a group of approximately 50 works, including paintings, prints, drawings and videos.

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.

Her exhibition, Amy Sillman. Oh, Clock!, – which was on view at Kunstmuseum Bern from 20.9.2024–2.2.2025 and travelled then to Ludwig Forum Aachen (22.3.–24.8.2025) – presented 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.

Amy Sillman’s artistic practice has extended outward from the studio in many different directions over the years, and has included lecturing, writing, publishing, and more recently, curatorial projects and interventions with museum collections. For the occasion of her show Oh, Clock!, the artist has constructed a special installation chosen from the Kunstmuseum Bern’s own collection. This includes a group of approximately 50 works, including paintings, prints, drawings and videos. 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.

In this way, the Kunstmuseum opens its own collections to a refreshed view from a different perspective, using the artists own work as a filter to create formal and political affiliations. Sillman’s particular interest in outliers and artists with less commercial careers will, by additionally ‘puncturing’ canonical structures inherent to the collection, shed new light on what has been overlooked.

Collection Intervention by Amy Sillman

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Collection Intervention by Amy Sillman

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Works with text are marked in yellow