Amy Sillman’s exhibition Oh, Clock! at the Kunstmuseum Bern, boldly disrupts the museum space and ways of looking at art. Vivid interventions on architecture, a radical remix of the museum’s collection, alongside Sillman’s selected paintings, drawings, and animated films from fifteen years, brings a passionate, exciting New York energy to her first major solo exhibition in Europe.
The title of the show, Oh, Clock! refers to the unspooling of time, process, and physical labor in Sillman’s art. Behind the restless bold shapes, and colors, lies a ruthless, lengthy practice of experimentation, editing, and starting over.
Sillman has established a pointedly different approach to abstract gesture and expression, post-1950s male-dominated AbEx, and has played an important role in redetermining contemporary painting, along with artists such as Laura Owens, Charlene von Heyl, Jacqueline Humphries, and Nicole Eisenman. Informed by her feminist, punk, DIY, and poststructuralist sensibilities, and a deep knowledge of art history, she portrays with humor, human frailties and emotional states, whilst exploring the liminal possibilities between formal abstraction and figuration.