Online Reading
Albert Oehlen
New Paintings
Albert Oehlen: New Paintings is available for online reading from April 7 through June 5 as part of Artist Spotlight: Albert Oehlen. Published on the occasion of the artist’s first exhibition in Asia, in 2019, this volume presents a series of new paintings in watercolor on canvas. Emphasizing the importance of spontaneity within his artistic method, Oehlen’s decision to use watercolor marks a stylistic return to his hazy, blended, almost impressionistic oil paintings dating from 2016 and earlier. The catalogue features a text by Christian Malycha, as well as photographs of the works in process, and is bilingual, in English and Chinese.
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Albert Oehlen: New Paintings (Hong Kong: Gagosian, 2019)
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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.
Albert Oehlen on the set of van G (2023). Photo: Simon Hemmer
Playlist
Albert Oehlen
Tramonto Spaventoso
Albert Oehlen has created a playlist of fourteen tracks on Spotify ranging in genres from free jazz to techno. Featuring musicians such as Steamboat Switzerland and Colin Stetson, the playlist shares the title of his upcoming exhibition at Gagosian, Beverly Hills, in which he interprets and transforms John Graham’s painting Tramonto Spaventoso (Terrifying Sunset) (1940–49). The artist discovered the work by the Russian-born American modernist painter in the 1990s and has been fascinated with it ever since.
Albert Oehlen in his studio, Ispaster, Spain, 2020. Artwork © Albert Oehlen. Photo: Esther Freund
Artist Spotlight
Albert Oehlen
April 7–13, 2021
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 is perhaps best known for his embrace of “bad” painting. Alongside his many rules, he allows a certain awkwardness 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.
Photo: Alejandro Ernesto/EPA/Shutterstock
Now available
Gagosian Quarterly Summer 2024
The Summer 2024 issue of Gagosian Quarterly is now available, featuring a detail of Roy Lichtenstein’s Bauhaus Stairway Mural (1989) on the cover.
Maurizio Cattelan: Sunday Painter
Curated by Francesco Bonami, Sunday is the first solo presentation of new work by Maurizio Cattelan in New York in over twenty years. Here, Bonami asks us to consider Cattelan as a political artist, detailing the potent and clear observations at the core of these works.
Frank Stella
In celebration of the life and work of Frank Stella, the Quarterly shares the artist’s last interview from our Summer 2024 issue. Stella spoke with art historian Megan Kincaid about friendship, formalism, and physicality.
Highlights: Salone del Mobile Milano 2024
This year’s Salone del Mobile Milano brought together a range of installations, debuts, and collaborations from across the worlds of design, fashion, and architecture. We present a selection of these projects.
Stanley Whitney: Vibrations of the Day
Stanley Whitney invited professor and musician-biographer John Szwed to his studio on Long Island, New York, as he prepared for an upcoming survey at the Buffalo AKG Art Museum to discuss the resonances between painting and jazz.
Richard Armstrong
Richard Armstrong, director emeritus of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum and Foundation, joins the Quarterly’s Alison McDonald to discuss his election to the board of the Helen Frankenthaler Foundation, as well as the changing priorities and strategies facing museums, foundations, and curators. He reflects on his various roles within museums and recounts his first meeting with Frankenthaler.
Touch of Evil
Andrew Russeth situates Jamian Juliano-Villani’s daring paintings within her myriad activities shaking up the art world.
Vladimir Kagan’s First Collection: An Interview with Chris Eitel
Chris Eitel, Vladimir Kagan’s protégé and the current director of design and production at Vladimir Kagan Design Group, invited the Quarterly’s Wyatt Allgeier to the brand’s studio in New Jersey, where the two discussed the forthcoming release of the First Collection. The series, now available through holly hunt, reintroduces the first chair and table that Kagan ever designed—part of Eitel’s efforts to honor the furniture avant-gardist’s legacy while carrying the company into the future.
Institutional Buzz
On the occasion of Andrea Fraser ’sexhibition at the Fondazione Antonio Dalle Nogare in Bolzano, Italy, Mike Stinavage speaks with the feminist performance artist about institutions and their discontents.
Simon Hantaï: Azzurro
Join curator Anne Baldassari as she discusses the exhibition Simon Hantaï:Azzurro, Gagosian, Rome, and the significance of blue in the artist’s practice. The show forms part of a triptych with Gagosian’s two previous Hantaï exhibitions, LES NOIRS DU BLANC, LES BLANCS DU NOIR at Le Bourget in 2019–20, and Les blancs de la couleur, la couleur du blanc in New York, in 2022.
Game Changer: Alexey Brodovitch
Gerry Badger reflects on the persistent influence of the graphic designer and photographer Alexey Brodovitch, the subject of an upcoming exhibition at the Barnes Foundation, Philadelphia.
Outsider Artist
David Frankel considers the life and work of Jeff Perrone, an artist who rejected every standard of success, and reflects on what defines an existence devoted to art.