Amy Sillman.
Oh, Clock!

Amy Sillman. Oh, Clock!

(Part 1, first floor of the new wing)

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.

This exhibition 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 body of 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.

Sillman’s approach is both deeply thought-out and felt. She uncovers a kind of hidden visual history of the twentieth century that traces affective form. Her painting and her curatorial work invite us to expand our visual archives and to move beyond what is already known.