![Albert Oehlen: Terrifying Sunset](https://gagosian.com/media/images/quarterly/interview-albert-oehlen-terrifying-sunset/fA_FwF9BxFEu_300x300.jpg)
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.
Extended through May 20, 2023
Gagosian is pleased to announce the ömen: Albert Oehlen paintings and Paul McCarthy sculptures, an exhibition of recent paintings by Albert Oehlen juxtaposed with large-scale sculptural works by Paul McCarthy.
Oehlen uses abstract, figurative, and collaged elements—often applying self-imposed formal constraints—to disrupt the histories and conventions of modern painting while acknowledging the continuing significance of classical art. Approaching his practice as a perceptual challenge, he moves freely between planned and improvised strategies. And while championing self-consciously “bad” painting characterized by crude drawing and jarring coloration, he infuses expressive gesture with Surrealist attitude, disparaging the quest for stable form and meaning.
McCarthy has been known since the 1970s for performances, videos, sculptures, and installations that confront viewers with a perverse Grand Guignol vision populated by an array of grotesque characters. Pairing a focus on sex and violence with a consciously infantilized approach to human bodily function, he probes the darkest corners of the American subconscious, exposing its synthetic manifestations in the mass media and built environment. McCarthy’s clownish, dystopian twist on utopian European Actionism continues to exert a powerful influence.
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.