Albert Oehlen: Terrifying Sunset
The artist speaks with Mark Godfrey about his new paintings, touching on the works’ relationship to John Graham, the Rothko Chapel, and Leigh Bowery.
I think if you can revise your own judgment, it’s the most beautiful thing that can happen to you.
—Albert Oehlen
Gagosian Athens is pleased to announce Works on Paper and a Sculpture, an exhibition of work by Albert Oehlen featuring recent drawings and collages and a new sculpture. The exhibition opens on June 9 and is part of a dynamic calendar of art events taking place in Greece this summer.
In the exhibition’s solitary sculpture, Oehlen refers to his cryptic Ömega Man motif, a genderless humanoid form prompted by the character of Dr. Robert Neville in the eponymous dystopian sci-fi action movie from 1971. A doomed survivor of a global pandemic, Neville symbolizes, in his desperate predicament, the runaway scientific development that led to humanity’s downfall; Oehlen’s deliberately crude but powerfully robust homage, rendered in cast aluminum, suggests a firm stance in the face of impending calamity.
While sculpture is a more recent area of interest for Oehlen, he remains committed to testing the boundaries of painting, the practice he has explored for more than forty years. In his work on paper, he continues to juxtapose and combine abstract, figurative, and collaged elements, revising and disrupting the histories and conventions of modernism with an unexpected nod to classical art. Shifting from careful planning to free improvisation, he unearths surprising new possibilities.
The artist speaks with Mark Godfrey about his new paintings, touching on the works’ relationship to John Graham, the Rothko Chapel, and Leigh Bowery.
The Summer 2021 issue of Gagosian Quarterly is now available, featuring Carrie Mae Weems’s The Louvre (2006) on its cover.
Albert Oehlen speaks to Mark Godfrey about a recent group of abstract paintings, “academic” art, reversing habits, and questioning rules.
This film by Albert Oehlen, with music by Tim Berresheim, takes us inside the artist’s studio in Switzerland as he works on a new painting.
Hans Ulrich Obrist interviews the artist on the occasion of his recent exhibition at the Serpentine Galleries, London.
The artist met with art historian Christian Malycha to discuss his newest paintings.
The Fall 2019 issue of Gagosian Quarterly is now available, featuring a detail from Sinking (2019) by Nathaniel Mary Quinn on its cover.
At the Palazzo Grassi, Venice, a career-spanning exhibition of paintings by Albert Oehlen, entitled Cows by the Water, went on view in the spring of 2018. Caroline Bourgeois, the curator of the exhibition, discusses how the show was organized around the artist’s relationship to music.