Ludwig Forum Aachen, Aachen, Germany
March 22, 2025–May 17, 2026
Oh, Clock! is the first major solo exhibition in Germany by Amy Sillman. 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 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.
The title Oh, Clock! refers to Sillman’s long-standing interest in exploring painting as a timebased medium. Each work charts different units and modes of time; the large-scale canvases are both intuitively and analytically constructed over long periods of up to a year, during which time they are repeatedly drawn, destroyed, and ultimately reworked layer by layer. “There is time in the paintings—the time of their creation, which remains largely hidden from the viewer. I like to expose the under-layers to think about how time is wrapped up in them,” explains the artist. Unfurled drawings track Sillman’s moment-by-moment process; she uses mechanical mean—animation and printmaking—to create orchestrations of time within architecture. The viewer of the exhibition Oh, Clock! finds themself 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 reconstitutes histories of painting anew.
Oh Clock! is curated by Eva Birkenstock with curatorial assistance from Mailin Haberland and Anna Marckwal, and was on view March 22, 2025–August 31, 2025.
Learn more at Ludwig Forum Aachen.
Collection Intervention
In addition to the exhibition, an ongoing 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, remains on long term view.
Learn more about the Collection Intervention by Amy Sillman.
