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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.

The Artist Spotlight series highlights the work of individual artists for one week each month. Launched in spring 2020 as a weekly platform, the series is now in its second season and is presented as a regular part of the gallery’s programming. Each Artist Spotlight features new online content, and artwork by the artist is made available with pricing information for forty-eight hours only.

Artist Spotlight: Albert Oehlen features a new painting by the artist. For more information, please contact the gallery at collecting@gagosian.com.

Photo: Alejandro Ernesto/EPA/Shutterstock

Photo: Alejandro Ernesto/EPA/Shutterstock

Related News

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 in his studio, Ispaster, Spain, 2020. Artwork © Albert Oehlen. Photo: Esther Freund

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.

Listen Now

Albert Oehlen in his studio, Ispaster, Spain, 2020. Artwork © Albert Oehlen. Photo: Esther Freund

Albert Oehlen: New Paintings (Hong Kong: Gagosian, 2019)

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.

Albert Oehlen: New Paintings (Hong Kong: Gagosian, 2019)

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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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