Send in the Clowns: Sasha Rossman on Amy Sillman at the Kunstmuseum Bern

Review of Amy Sillman "O'Clock" at the Kunstmuseum Bern, 2025. With her first institutional survey in Europe, which opened in Bern last fall, Amy Sillman expands the well-established temporal dimension of her practice, which includes layers, series, and repetitions, into a dialogue with the Kunstmuseum’s collection. The coiled quality of her gestures – the physicality of the mark as well as the process of its making that are at play in her paintings – manifests here in art historical constellations and murals across the two-storied exhibition space as well as in her own work. As Sasha Rossman argues, this results in a suspenseful viewing experience that subverts the linearity of time and fixity of position both humorously and rebelliously.