Albert Oehlen

Galerie Max Hetzler / Holzwarth Publications, Berlin 2011
With a text by Anne Pontégnie

‘Albert Oehlen long ago constructed the possibility of his own painting. Yet, at the beginning of 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 has 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 emerged in order to reflect on it.’

A. Pontegnie, ‘The history of abstraction seemed to be finished’, in Albert Oehlen, exh. cat., Berlin: Galerie Max Hetzler and Holzwarth Publications, 2011, p. 5

Publisher: Galerie Max Hetzler / Holzwarth Publications
Text: Anne Pontégnie
Publication date: 2011
Binding: Hardcover
Dimensions: 33.5 x 24.3 x 1.3 cm
Pages: 53
ISBN: 978-3-935567-54-1
Catalogue PDF

€ 35.00

Albert Oehlen

Artist page on maxhetzler.com

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Related Exhibition

Albert Oehlen

Paintings 2004–2005 (catalogue)

Oudenarder Straße 16-20, Berlin-Wedding

2011

Exhibition page on maxhetzler.com