Galerie Max Hetzler Berlin | Paris | London / Nahmad Contemporary / Holzwarth Publications, Berlin 2020 With an essay by Raphael Rubinstein
‘Art can be slow to reveal itself. Even when work gains immediate recognition, as was the case with the Spiegelbilder or Mirror Paintings, a series of oil paintings with mirrors attached to them that Albert Oehlen created between 1982 and 1990, time must pass before we can begin to grasp its fuller relationship to its epoch, and to ours. Now, nearly forty years later, the implications and importance of this distinctive body of work – to art history and to our understanding of Oehlen's work in general – are emerging.’ Raphael Rubinstein, ‘Albert Oehlen's Mirror Paintings, An Inescapable Contingency’, in: Albert Oehlen: Spiegelbilder. Mirror Paintings 1982–1990, exh. cat., Galerie Max Hetzler Berlin | Paris | London / Nahmad Contemporary and Holzwarth Publications, Berlin 2020, p. 10–11
Publisher: Galerie Max Hetzler Berlin | Paris | London / Nahmad Contemporary / Holzwarth Publications Publication date: 2020 Binding: Hardcover with belly band Dimensions: 29 x 24,5 x 1,5 cm Pages: 84 ISBN: 978-3-947127-22-1
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One of the most respected painters today, Albert Oehlen (b. 1954) constantly questions the methods and means of painting to raise a sense of awareness of the medium, which he aims to reinvent and to reshape, always in opposition to traditional hierarchies. Albert Oehlen has been continually colliding various styles, orders or mediums since the 80’s, expanding the notion of painting to ‘what he wants to see’. ‘Albert Oehlen long ago constructed the possibility of his own painting. Yet at the beginning the road seemed not merely a narrow alley, it looked like a dead end. What then? Give up and turn back? Or take a hammer and drive a tunnel through the solid amorphous mass before him? Albert Oehlen was one of the very few to take up that hammer. And when he started he struck mighty blows. It was in materials, expression, history and genre – in everything his immediate predecessors had progressively demolished with their hammers – that Oehlen stated his determination not to give in. His possibility of painting had to be built from the foundations. No gratuitous transgressions, no irony or cynicism – even if it is true that some used these terms to disparage his efforts to be free of artistic propriety. Instead Oehlen went looking where nobody else did, plunging into the piles of detritus abandoned by the wayside of an era. Then a final task remained: that of interweaving painting as history with the position of the painter and with the society out of which both painting and painter emerge in order to reflect on it.’ A. Pontégnie, The history of abstraction seemed to be finished in Albert Oehlen, Galerie Max Hetzler and Holzwarth Publications, 2011
Artist page on maxhetzler.com
Spiegelbilder (1982–1990)
41 Dover Street, London
2019
Exhibition page on maxhetzler.com
