by Mia Butter // May 16, 2025
Definitively not a retrospective, ‘Oh, Clock!’ displays hundreds of works by Amy Sillman from the past 15 years in a way that could be perceived as one–with a twist. In her first museum exhibition in Germany, the New York painter overhauls the Ludwig Forum in Aachen with her own works, and by curating selected works from the museum’s collection. While her solo exhibition, spread over four rooms, is separated from her curatorial venture by the Ludwig Forum’s expansive main hall, Sillman has painted circles, arrows, as well as her own name and that of the exhibition on the walls for entering visitors. There are few corners of the museum without her touch, and even those works that remain in the main hall—such as Gabriel Kuri’s ‘Items in Care of Items’—are referenced. A yellow arrow in the same school bus yellow as Kuri’s 2008 sculpture guides the visitor to the glass doors where the show officially begins.
Amy Sillman: ‘Coin Lady 3, 2024, exhibition view ‘Amy Sillman. Oh, Clock!,’ at Ludwig Forum Aachen, 2025 // Photo by Mareike Tocha
‘Oh, Clock!’ is a collaborative show inaugurated in Bern at the Kunstmuseum in 2024, where Sillman similarly curated works from the Swiss museum’s collection. Sillman is presented with a strikingly different, yet still star-studded, collection in Aachen. From Rauschenberg to Warhol, Sillman places her works in direct contact with the collected ones, blurring the lines between curator and artist, solo show and group show.
Sillman has toyed with layering, and creates scores to define each layer she adds to her paintings. The dreaded question posed to many painters–how do you know when a painting is complete?–can be quickly snubbed this way. But while traditional painting allows for endless addition, its subtraction that has proven trickier–until digital mediums became available. The reference to time in the exhibition title carries more than just a play on the word o’clock, it references the temporal nature of creating art with the additional factor of technology. While Sillman is hardly the first, nor the last, painter to be confronted with the new concept of undoing a mark, her very literal approach to displaying the concept through several stages of unfinished works placed in a row feels less interesting, but more investigative and honest. Dare I say: experimental.
‘Amy Sillman. Oh, Clock!,’ exhibition view at Ludwig Forum Aachen, 2025 // Photo by Mareike Tocha
It’s important to mention that while Sillman is a painter, her practice is primarily defined by its experimental nature more than any one medium. Beneath the title scrawled in the main hall stands a vitrine with several of the artist’s zines. On a few occasions, spread throughout the show, televisions and projections of stop-motion like animations break up the works on paper and canvas. These are welcomed interruptions, especially because they represent the artist’s appreciation for her primary medium outside of painting. Even digitally, Sillman hasn’t managed to evade the brushstroke, feeling painterly and analog with their stop-motion cadence, and when she isn’t painting, she is screen-printing brushstrokes.
‘Amy Sillman. Oh, Clock!,’ exhibition view at Ludwig Forum Aachen, 2025 // Photo by Mareike Tocha
When it comes to her drawings, of which there are several at the Ludwig Forum, her ‘Election Drawings’ from 2016 are the less colourful, more direct works featured in the show. Eight selected charcoal drawings from the full series of 23 show one roughly sketched figure to the next, vomiting, lying in bed or weakly positioned on all fours. Created in response to Donald Trump’s first election as President, the artist practically creates emojis of a collective response, shared by her and many Americans. Exaggerated for humor, the scraggly figures are slapstick, and thus the work’s purpose is reactivated right on time, for the advent of Trump’s second term. Visually, as well as size-wise, the ‘Election Drawings’ series consists of much smaller works than those it shares the second room with, but this doesn’t stop them from dominating.
‘Amy Sillman. Oh, Clock!,’ exhibition view at Ludwig Forum Aachen, 2025 // Photo by Mareike Tocha
The balancing act of the figurative and the abstract is not only present in her own works, but also in how Sillman curates. One gets the impression that Sillman possesses a profound knowledge of art history, one that clearly defines her practice. Not only are her scores for her paintings, such as the series ‘May (score) Series,’ based on purely formal aspects such as colour and pattern, but her selection of works from the Ludwig Forum collection was decided in a similar fashion. Whether it’s this shared formal approach in her painting and curating, or the obvious connection between her own paintings and those on the walls beneath the curated works, the lines are blurred between her solo show and the selected pieces she has curated. This works out quite well, because her works are contextualized within the museum in an exciting way for the artist and the viewer. She is not the first to do this, either–Scott Burton did something similar with Constantin Brancusi’s works at the MoMA in 1989, for example–but her incredibly distinct style, and the honest commitment to her interest that prevails in her practice, feels like everything she touches turns to Sillman.
‘Amy Sillman. Oh, Clock!,’ exhibition view at Ludwig Forum Aachen, 2025 // Photo by Mareike Tocha
Sillman takes over the museum, and the museum lets her do it. Her works engulf the space, seeping onto the walls carrying the collection pieces, which—in the spirit of all things time-based–are to be painted white when all is said and done. Sillman’s humor, sharp awareness of art history and smooth integration of her own artworks distances ‘Oh, Clock!’ from the category of retrospective, in its Aachen iteration. A retrospective is, after all, a glance into the past–and situating Sillman’s work in a chronological, linear way would be a disservice to an artist still actively playing with the notion of time.
Exhibition Info
Ludwig Forum
Amy Sillman: ‘Oh, Clock!’
Exhibition: Mar. 22-Aug. 31, 2025
ludwigforum.de
Jülicher Str. 97-109, 52070 Aachen, click here for map
