Collection intervention by Amy Sillman

Amy Sillman curates a selection from the collection of the Kunstmuseum Bern

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.

Over the years Sillman’s artistic practice has extended outward from the studio in many different directions, and has included lecturing, writing, publishing, and more recently, curatorial projects and interventions with museum collections. For the occasion of her solo show Amy Sillman. Oh, Clock! (until 2.2.2025) the artist has constructed a special installation chosen from the Kunstmuseum Bern’s own collection, which will remain on view until 2.11.2025. 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. Thus, she has rethought 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, Miriam Cahn, 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, Thomas Kovachevich, Lee Krasner, Alfred Kubin, Maria Lassnig, Fernand Léger, Otto Meyer-Amden, Heinz Mollet, 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 und Franz West.