Albert Oehlen

New strategies in painting: A personal survey of Albert Oehlen's art"Freedom for me means playing. It does not mean to be in a void and make crazy moves, it means to play with your own rules." --Albert OehlenThe paintings of Albert Oehlen (born 1954) live by audacious strategies, the subversion of h [...]
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New strategies in painting: A personal survey of Albert Oehlen's art"Freedom for me means playing. It does not mean to be in a void and make crazy moves, it means to play with your own rules." --Albert OehlenThe paintings of Albert Oehlen (born 1954) live by audacious strategies, the subversion of his own rules, and by the painterly beauty of their abstract, open forms. This new, revelatory, and self-curated survey concentrates on Oehlen's paintings from the past 30 years. Well-known works are presented together with seldom-seen pieces to survey Oehlen's practice and his themes. In two lengthy conversations with John Corbett and Alexander Klar, Oehlen talks us through his career and ponders the challenge of facing the empty canvas anew each morning. Excerpts from contemporary texts are joined by key writings by critics and curators over the span of the artist's career to provide a historical perspective to his oeuvre.Together this oral and visual record explores Oehlen's trajectory from the abstract paintings he made at the end of the 1980s, to his first use of pixelated images, which he produced on one of the first personal computers, and modified by hand. We encounter Oehlen's series with a restricted palette of gray tonalities; his collaged fragments of garish poster ads on canvases, transforming screaming slogans into abstract elements; his finger paintings; and his recent series of tree paintings in which black, vaguely treelike silhouettes contort themselves into a lexicon of abstract forms. Throughout, Oehlen transforms the conceptual into the compositional, at once invigorating and challenging the viewer with fresh ways of thinking about painting.Text in English, French, and German