Oh, Clock! is the first major solo exhibition in Germany by the New York-based painter Amy Sillman (born 1955, Detroit). Drawing on her long and distinguished engagement with painting and its history both on and beyond the canvas, the show offers a comprehensive exploration of the artist’s highly versatile and hybrid systems of artmaking. Oh, Clock! is composed of two parts: Part one of the exhibition (on view through August 31, 2025 at Ludwig Forum Aachen) featured 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.
Amy Sillman’s studio practice extends outward from painting in many different directions, and over the years it has included writing, publishing projects, animations, and recently various curatorial projects with museum collections. In 2019, for instance, for The Shape of Shape at MoMA New York, she chose over 80 works from the museum’s collection in which shape prevails over other considerations. “Even though shape is everywhere,” she explained back then, “we don’t talk about it much; it’s not a hot topic in art, like color or systems.” For the occasion of the exhibition cooperation between Kunstmuseum Bern and Ludwig Forum Aachen, Amy Sillman was once again invited to engage with both institutions collections as part of Oh, Clock!. Following her collection presentation at Kunstmuseum Bern (on view through November 2, 2025), installed against an active backdrop of her wall paintings, in Aachen Sillman deeply engaged with works from the Ludwig Collection. She used terms such as figure, color, pattern and emptiness—terms that are crucial to her own painting practice—as filters for her selection. Approximately 80 paintings, drawings, prints, and scultures are presented on the walls of three galleries as well as on five newly produced double-sided walls on wheels. Sillman has covered these walls with improvisatory wall paintings created on site. The artist thus weaves together diverse schools, continents, media and artistic styles, and builds an expansive language of form, color, time and meaning by building a new interweaving of foreground and background, harmonies and tensions. She has arranged works not chronologically or thematically, but guided by matters of form, color, scale and site-specific relationships between art objects, architecture, and the museum itself. In this way, Kunstmuseum Bern and Ludwig Forum opened their own collections to a refreshed view from a different perspective, using the artists own methodology to create formal and political affiliations. Sillman’s particular interest in outliers and artists with less commercial careers will, by additionally ‘puncturing’ canonical structures inherent to the collections, shed new light on what has been overlooked.
With works by Carla Accardi, John Ahearn, Laurie Anderson, Belkis Ayón, Donald Baechler, Nairy Baghramian, Georg Baselitz, Tim Berresheim, Bernhard Johannes Blume, Mel Bochner, Peter Brüning, Lygia Clark, Alan Cote, Ivan Čujkov, Rolf-Gunter Dienst, Felix Droese, Marianne Eigenheer, Siron Franco, Gotthard Graubner, Ellen Gronemeyer, Richard Hamilton, Jann Haworth, Alex Hay, Gottfried Helnwein, Peter Herrmann, Jörg Immendorff, Bertram Jesdinsky, Jasper Johns, Maksim Kantor, Konrad Klapheck, Oleg Kudrjaschov, Gabriel Kuri, Fehér László, Roy Lichtenstein, Ivan Lubennikov, Brigitta Malche, Anatolij Mašarov, Wolfgang Mattheuer, Lázaro García Medina, István Nádler, Galina Neledva, Kenneth Noland, Igor Obrosov, Albert Oehlen, Nikola Ovčinnikov, A.R. Penck, Raymond Pettibon, Uwe Pfeifer, Peter Piller, Viktor Pivovarov, Adelaida Pologova, Robert Rauschenberg, Gerhard Richter, Rissa, Otto Sander-Tischbein, Augustinas Savickas, Inga Savranskaja, Hans Scheib, Aleksandr Sitnikov, Emil Sorge, Eduard Steinberg, Radiš Tordija, Don Van Vliet, Sergej Volkov, Andy Warhol, Walerian Wassiljev, William Wegman, Hermann Weisweiler, and Dmitrij Žilinskij.
Amy Sillman. Oh, Clock! is curated by Eva Birkenstock with curatorial assistance by Mailin Haberland and Anna Marckwald and is a cooperation with Kunstmuseum Bern.
Supported by Peter and Irene Ludwig Foundation, Victor Rolff Stiftung, Sparkassen-Kulturstiftung Rheinland, and Jugend- und Kulturstiftung der Sparkasse Aachen.
Credits: Amy Sillman, Oh, Clock!, exhibition view Ludwig Forum Aachen, 2025, photo: Mareike Tocha.
