Amy Sillman: Oh, Clock!

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 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 probing painting by means of material and conceptual investigations. She borrows from cut-and-paste poetics, the logic of books and film, 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 New York in the 1970s and the artistic examinations of that period between the visual and the verbal, and between personal and political modes of critical thinking. Rather than orienting herself toward 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 had a strong bond to a historical tradition of abstraction, in such work as Gertrude Stein’s writing and the animations of Robert Breer. Throughout 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 exhibition catalogue essay, her drawings and paintings occupy “the liminal space between words and images, 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 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-bymoment process; she uses mechanical mean—animation and printmaking—to create orchestrations of time within architecture. Temporary Object (2023–25), shown in the foyer of the exhibition on a long shelf, unearths the many changes that occurred in the making of one single painting through a series of printed diagrams, without ever showing the final painting itself. In Untitled (Frieze for Venice) (2021), Sillman sequences time in a choreographed room-size cycle of works made over the course of two years. “I always cut, ruin, dub over, erase, add, scrape, bring back, continue, reverse. The digital gave me a useful tool in being able to go both forward and backward in time … not just accumulatively forwards as in a painted surface.” 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.

Curated by Eva Birkenstock.
Curatorial assistance: Mailin Haberland and Anna Marckwald

Amy Sillman. Oh, Clock! is a cooperation with Kunstmuseum Bern.

The exhibition is accompanied by the publication Amy Sillman. Oh, Clock!, with contributions by Julia Bryan-Wilson, Sabeth Buchmann, Rose Higham-Stainton, Michelle Kuo, Jenny Nachtigall, and a conversation with Amy Sillman, Eva Birkenstock, and Kathleen Bühler, published by Verlag der Buchhandlung Walther und Franz König.