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Albert Oehlen

Albert Oehlen, I 11, 2009 Paper on canvas, 66 15/16 × 90 9/16 inches (170 × 230 cm)© Albert Oehlen

Albert Oehlen, I 11, 2009

Paper on canvas, 66 15/16 × 90 9/16 inches (170 × 230 cm)
© Albert Oehlen

Albert Oehlen, FM 38, 2011 Oil and paper on canvas, 86 ⅝ × 74 13/16 inches (220 × 190 cm)© Albert Oehlen, photo by Mike Bruce

Albert Oehlen, FM 38, 2011

Oil and paper on canvas, 86 ⅝ × 74 13/16 inches (220 × 190 cm)
© Albert Oehlen, photo by Mike Bruce

Albert Oehlen, Untitled, 2014 Oil on Dibond, 147 ⅝ × 98 7/16 inches (375 × 250 cm)© Albert Oehlen, photo by Lothar Schnepf

Albert Oehlen, Untitled, 2014

Oil on Dibond, 147 ⅝ × 98 7/16 inches (375 × 250 cm)
© Albert Oehlen, photo by Lothar Schnepf

Albert Oehlen, Untitled (Baum 30), 2015 Oil on Dibond, 118 ⅛ × 78 ¾ inches (300 × 200 cm)© Albert Oehlen, photo by Stuart Burford

Albert Oehlen, Untitled (Baum 30), 2015

Oil on Dibond, 118 ⅛ × 78 ¾ inches (300 × 200 cm)
© Albert Oehlen, photo by Stuart Burford

Albert Oehlen, Untitled (Baum 84), 2016 Oil on dibond, 98 7/16 × 98 7/16 inches (250 × 250 cm)© Albert Oehlen, photo by Stefan Rohner

Albert Oehlen, Untitled (Baum 84), 2016

Oil on dibond, 98 7/16 × 98 7/16 inches (250 × 250 cm)
© Albert Oehlen, photo by Stefan Rohner

About

Qualities that I want to see brought together: delicacy and coarseness, color and vagueness, and, underlying them all, a base note of hysteria.
—Albert Oehlen

Albert Oehlen’s oeuvre is a testament to the innate freedom of the creative act. Through expressionist brushwork, surrealist methodology, and self-conscious amateurism he engages with the history of abstract painting, pushing the basic components of abstraction to new extremes.

Oehlen studied at the Hochschule für bildende Künste Hamburg in Germany from 1978 to 1981 and quickly rose to prominence in the Berlin and Cologne art scenes. He came to be associated with the Junge Wilde artists, including Martin Kippenberger and Werner Büttner, who sought to create work that defied categorization and refuted the artistic status quo. Straddling various debates surrounding the nature of painting, Oehlen’s work deconstructed the medium to its constituent elements—color, gesture, motion, and time—and evolved out of constraints he applied to his artistic process. This line of investigation, which Oehlen has continued to pursue in the decades since has resulted in striking variations between—from works that combine abstract and figurative styles, created in response to the Neo-Expressionism of the 1980s, to paintings comprising of grids of colored squares.

As Oehlen began to incorporate new technologies into his work—inkjet printers, computer-aided design programs, and references to the pixelated lines of computer screens—the parameters that he set for himself shifted, offering new obstacles and challenges. Some of these self-imposed “rules” include limiting his palette and combining perambulating black lines with carefully blended gradations (in the Baumbilder [Tree Paintings]), and utilizing erasure and layering to juxtapose bright and muddy colors, as in the Elevator Paintings, a single work in nine parts from 2016. In the late 1990s, Oehlen spray-painted over collaged imagery that had been transferred to canvas with large, industrial printers typically used to create billboards.

Oehlen is perhaps best known for his embrace of “bad” painting. Alongside his many rules, he allows a certain awkwardness or ugliness to enter his work, introducing unsettling gestures, crudely drawn figures, visceral smears of artificial pigments, bold hues, and flesh tones. In this way, he attests to the infinite combinations of form made possible through painting, and shows that these combinations can be manipulated at the artist’s will to produce novel perceptual challenges for the viewer.

Albert Oehlen

Photo: Katherine McMahon

Fairs, Events & Announcements

Albert Oehlen on the set of van G (2023). Photo: Simon Hemmer

Screening

Albert Oehlen
van G

Wednesday, March 20, 2024, 6pm
Curzon Mayfair, London
www.curzon.com

Join Gagosian for a special screening of van G (2023), a film made collaboratively by Albert Oehlen and director Oliver Hirschbiegel, in conjunction with the artist’s exhibition of new paintings at Gagosian, Grosvenor Hill, London. A romance, the film depicts the relationship between Vincent van Gogh (played by Ben Becker) and his models, whom he struggled to recruit and pay. Van G additionally provides insight into the artist’s techniques, clearing up some common misunderstandings about them. The screening will be followed by a question-and-answer session with Oehlen. The event is free to attend.

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Albert Oehlen on the set of van G (2023). Photo: Simon Hemmer

Albert Oehlen, Untitled, 2023 © Albert Oehlen. Photo: Stefan Rohner

Lecture

ArtCenter Spring 2024 Graduate Seminar Lecture Series
Albert Oehlen and Laura Owens on Vincent van Gogh

Tuesday, March 12, 2024, 7:15pm
Los Angeles Times Media Center, Pasadena, California
www.artcentermfa.net

Albert Oehlen and fellow artist Laura Owens will be guest speakers at the Los Angeles Times Media Center as part of the ArtCenter College of Design Graduate Art MFA Spring 2024 Lecture Series. The pair will discuss Vincent van Gogh, whom they both address in their respective bodies of work. Oehlen will specifically talk about his recent film van G (2023), which recounts van Gogh’s relationship with his models, whom he struggled to recruit and pay. The event is free and open to the public.

Albert Oehlen, Untitled, 2023 © Albert Oehlen. Photo: Stefan Rohner

Ben Becker on the set of Geel (2023). Photo: Albert Oehlen

Screening and Talk

MOCA Artist Film Series
Albert Oehlen

Thursday, December 14, 2023, 6–8pm
Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles
www.moca.org

Join the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, for a screening of Albert Oehlen’s Geel (2023) as part of MOCA’s Artist Film series, a dynamic platform for the presentation of artist films. A romance, Geel depicts Vincent van Gogh’s (played by Ben Becker) relationship with his models, whom he struggled to recruit and pay. The film additionally provides insight into the artist’s techniques, clearing up some common misunderstandings about them. The screening will be followed by a conversation between Oehlen and MOCA senior curator Bennett Simpson. The event is free to attend.

Ben Becker on the set of Geel (2023). Photo: Albert Oehlen

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Museum Exhibitions

Installation view, Albert Oehlen, Friedrichs Foundation, Weidingen, Germany, August 27–December 17, 2023. Artwork © Albert Oehlen. Photo: Günzel | Rademacher

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Albert Oehlen

August 27–December 17, 2023
Friedrichs Foundation, Weidingen, Germany
friedrichsfoundation.org

Albert Oehlen has produced an expansive installation that playfully integrates twelve paintings into the Friedrichs Foundation’s exhibition hall. He creates overtly fragmented images in which traces, stimuli, and afterimages of reality flash across the canvases, causing a sense of disorientation. This approach has afforded Oehlen an exceptional degree of freedom, as with each new image, he updates and renews the possibilities and impossibilities of painting.

Installation view, Albert Oehlen, Friedrichs Foundation, Weidingen, Germany, August 27–December 17, 2023. Artwork © Albert Oehlen. Photo: Günzel | Rademacher

Helen Frankenthaler, Overture, 1992 © 2023 Helen Frankenthaler Foundation, Inc./Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

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The Inner Island

April 28–November 4, 2023
Fondation Carmignac, Porquerolles, France
www.fondationcarmignac.com

This exhibition, which features more than eighty works by fifty artists, presents visitors with new, unknown worlds floating outside familiar geographies and temporalities. The artists included break away from reality, bringing to life fictional, mental, and abstract islands. Work by Harold Ancart, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Alexander Calder, Helen Frankenthaler, Simon Hantaï, Roy Lichtenstein, Albert Oehlen, and Christopher Wool is included.

Helen Frankenthaler, Overture, 1992 © 2023 Helen Frankenthaler Foundation, Inc./Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

Albert Oehlen, Untitled, 1990 © Albert Oehlen

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Beautiful, Vivid, Self-contained

April 21–July 21, 2023
Hill Art Foundation, New York
hillartfoundation.org

Beautiful, Vivid, Self-contained is an exhibition curated by David Salle that brings together paintings and sculptures by artists working across different eras, mediums, and geographies to explore the notion of affinity between works of art. Alongside a painting by Salle from 1988, work by Francis Bacon, Willem de Kooning, Mark Grotjahn, Brice Marden, Albert Oehlen, Pablo Picasso, Cy Twombly, and Christopher Wool is included.

Albert Oehlen, Untitled, 1990 © Albert Oehlen

Installation view, Raum Für Phantasievolle Aktionen: Neupräsentation Der Sammlung, Kunstmuseum Bonn, Germany, May 8, 2022–January 31, 2023. Artwork © Albert Oehlen

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Raum Für Phantasievolle Aktionen
Neupräsentation Der Sammlung

May 8, 2022–January 31, 2023
Kunstmuseum Bonn, Germany
www.kunstmuseum-bonn.de

This exhibition, whose title translates to Space for Imaginative Actions, celebrates the museum’s thirtieth anniversary on the Museum Mile and brings together monographic and thematic works from more than forty artists. Work by Jadé Fadojutimi, Albert Oehlen, and Gerhard Richter is included.

Installation view, Raum Für Phantasievolle Aktionen: Neupräsentation Der Sammlung, Kunstmuseum Bonn, Germany, May 8, 2022–January 31, 2023. Artwork © Albert Oehlen

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Press

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