Oh, Clock! is the first major solo exhibition of the New York painter Amy Sillman (*1955 in Detroit) in German-speaking countries. It sheds light on the artist's many years of critical engagement with the history of painting on and beyond the canvas and provides comprehensive insights into her multifaceted and hybrid systems.
Oh, Clock! consists of two parts: The first part of the exhibition features a concentrated selection of Sillman's work from the last ten years, including 24 paintings, over 300 drawings, prints and collages, several large installations and digital animations. The second part is a curatorial collection intervention by the artist: on diagonal walls painted by her, she presents several dozen works selected by her from the Peter and Irene Ludwig Collection in Aachen.
Since the early 1990s, Sillman has been exploring and expanding painting through material and conceptual investigations. She draws on the poetics of collage, follows the logic of books and films, and uses musical techniques such as improvisation and scores to guide her painting. Her artistic development is characterized by the New York of the 1970s and the artistic debates of the time between visual and linguistic forms of expression as well as personal and political forms of critical thinking. Instead of focusing on a superficial critique of painting as a "commercial" medium, Sillman oriented herself towards predecessors who pursued experimental approaches in art, philosophy, poetry and film. At the same time, she remained connected to the tradition of abstraction, such as the texts of Gertrude Stein and the animations of Robert Breer. Artists such as Philip Guston, Lee Krasner, Joan Mitchell, Eva Hesse, Nancy Spero, Elizabeth Murray, Ida Applebroog and Jack Whitten form central points of reference for her thinking. As art historian Jenny Nachtigall writes in the exhibition catalog, "Sillman's work often moves in the liminal space between words and images, abstraction and expression, meaning and sensation." Her painterly gestures negotiate fixed categories and explore moments of ambivalence, fragility, affect and doubt.
The title Oh, Clock! refers to the artist's ongoing interest in activating painting as a time-based medium. Each work reflects different units and modes of time. The large-format canvases are created intuitively and analytically over long periods of time, sometimes up to a year. During this time, they are painted over, destroyed and 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 lower layers to think about how time is wrapped up in them," explains Sillman about the exhibition. Spreading drawings make her artistic process comprehensible from moment to moment. In order to arrange time within architecture, she uses mechanical means such as animation and printing techniques. Temporary Object (2023), on display on a long shelf in the foyer of the exhibition, uses printed diagrams to show the many changes that occur during the creation of a painting, without showing the final image. In Untitled (Frieze for Venice) (2021), she sequences time in a choreographed, room-filling cycle of works created over a period of two years. "I am always cutting, defacing, painting over, erasing, adding, scratching away, retrieving, continuing and reversing. The digital has just given me a useful tool to go back and forth in time, not just cumulatively forward like a painted surface." Visitors to the exhibition Oh, Clock! find themselves in an "infinite cycle of a time spiral", as art historian Julia Bryan-Wilson notes, in which Amy Sillman endlessly expands and recreates stories of painting.
Curated by Eva Birkenstock
Curatorial assistance: Mailin Haberland and Anna Marckwald