The exhibition Oh, Clock! can be seen at the Ludwig Forum in Aachen from 22 March 2025. Oh, Clock! is the first major solo exhibition by New York painter Amy Sillman (born 1955 in Detroit) in Germany.
Image above: Amy Sillman. Oh, Clock!, exhibition view Ludwig Forum Aachen, 2025, photo: Mareike Tocha.
Drawing on her long-standing engagement with painting and its history, both on and off the canvas, the exhibition offers a comprehensive insight into the artist’s multifaceted and hybrid art systems.
Oh, Clock! is composed of two parts: Part one of the exhibition features a focused selection of Sillman’s work from the past decade, including twenty-four paintings, more than three hundred drawings, prints and collages, several large installations, and digital animations. The second part is a curatorial project by the artist, featuring hand-painted walls intervening diagonally in exhibition rooms, hung with dozens of works chosen from the Ludwig Collection in Aachen.
Since the early 1990s, Sillman has been exploring painting with the help of material and conceptual investigations. She borrows from cut-and-paste poetics, the logic of books and films, and music-inspired techniques such as improvisation and the use of a score as a kind of instruction manual. Her artistic development was shaped by the context of 1970s New York and the artistic explorations of the time between the visual and the verbal, and between personal and political forms of critical thinking.
Instead of orienting herself towards a superficial critique of painting as a ‘commercial’ medium, Sillman looked to predecessors who pursued experimental forms in art, philosophy, poetry and film. At the same time, the artist has always been closely associated with the historical tradition of abstraction, such as the writings of Gertrude Stein or the animations of Robert Breer.
In her work, artists such as Philip Guston, Lee Krasner, Joan Mitchell, Eva Hesse, Nancy Spero, Elizabeth Murray, Ida Applebroog and Jack Whitten continue to serve as central points of reference for her thinking. As the art historian Jenny Nachtigall writes in her essay in the exhibition catalogue, her drawings and paintings move ‘in the border area between word and image, abstraction and expression, meaning and feeling’. Sillman’s painterly gestures negotiate fixed categories and moments of ambivalence, fragility, affect and doubt.
The title Oh, Clock! refers to Sillman’s long-standing interest in exploring painting as a time-based medium. The large-format canvases are constructed both intuitively and analytically over long periods of up to a year, during which they are repeatedly drawn, destroyed and finally reworked layer by layer.
“There is a time in the paintings – the time of their creation, which remains largely hidden from the viewer. I like to expose the lower layers to think about how time is wrapped up in them,” the artist explains.
Rolled-up drawings trace Sillman’s process from one moment to the next; she uses mechanical means – animation and printing – to create temporal stagings in architecture. Temporary Object (2023-25), displayed on a long shelf in the exhibition foyer, uses a series of printed diagrams to show the many changes that took place during the creation of a single painting, without showing the final painting itself.
In Untitled (Frieze for Venice) (2021), Sillman organises time in a choreographed, room-filling cycle of works created over the course of two years. “I cut, destroy, transfer, delete, add, scratch, bring back, continue, turn around. The digital gave me a useful tool to go both forwards and backwards in time … not just accumulatively forwards like a painted surface.” The viewer of the exhibition Oh, Clock! finds themselves in an “endless cycle of a time spiral”, as art historian Julia Bryan-Wilson notes; it is a cycle in which Sillman endlessly expands and reassembles the history of painting.
WHEN?
Exhibition dates: Saturday, 22. March until Sunday, 31. August 2025
Opening hours:
Tue-Sun 10-17 h
Thu 10am-8pm
Monday closed
WHERE?
Ludwig Forum Aachen,
Jülicher Straße 97–109
52070 Aachen
