The multi-layered images of Amy Sillman, which can now be seen in Bern, document processes and banishe the complexity of life into exciting constellations between abstraction and figuration.
Cobalt blue is solid, royal blue looks noble at first, but is somehow vulgar, lemon yellow obnoble, carmine red inconstant," says Amy Sillman. Then she sets out to hang up the three paintings that are leaning on the walls in her Brooklyn studio and waiting to be put in shape. "The images and the colors they consist of are real emotional relationships for me," he says Sillman. Not emotional in the sense of a Jackson Pollock who threw his anger on the screen. But with the slightly neurotic devotion of an artist who translates intuition into physical action in order to dig deep into the layers of her images and materials. As a "complicated verion of metabolizing", which she compares with the moment in which desire becomes sex or thinking becomes language, Sill-man describes this process. In an essay on color theory, the artist calculated that a tube of cobalt blue costs as much as a bottle of champagne. That she might as well have bought a mink coat for all the money she spends on paints in a year and that a bag of color pigments comes at the same price as cocaine.
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