With a memory game’s slyness, the painter’s first institutional European survey springs her work free of its pigeonhole between abstraction and figuration.
The general portrayal of Amy Sillman’s work is not exempt from the rather annoying insistence on painting as “work between figuration and abstraction.” Painting, however, should manifest a gateway, as Sillman insightfully reassures us in her solo exhibition in Bern, where physical space and linear time are suspended, and all circular possibilities are made available.
It is a poignant metaphor both for Sillman’s understanding of her artistic process and for the our view onto such a large selection of her work. Visitors are given the opportunity to discover their own journey, to walk slowly, to look, to observe, to skip a room, to remember details in the manner of the similar or the crooked, to observe anew, to move backward and then forward again – all key to accessing Sillman’s complex and fragmentary idea of the experiential unity of space and painting.
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