Galerie Max Hetzler Berlin | Paris | London / Holzwarth Publications, Berlin 2018 With texts by Glenn Brown and Christian Malycha
‘There is a fine and noble sense of rebellion in the paintings of both Albert and Julian, which comes, I presume, from them having a fierce streak of individuality. Neither, I imagine, would relish the prospect of being considered a part of a group or movement, or even being compared to any other living artist. Both have set their sails for uncharted waters, leaving the safety of the dry land of academia in favour of the rough seas of artistic freedom. The expressive physicality of their paintings gives us an indication that each has a very personal vocabulary of gestural marks. Their works are very clearly, undeniably, and profoundly “theirs”. Their personalities are writ large. That, at least, is how we might first see these two self-styled rebels.’
G. Brown, ‘A fine sense of rebellion’, in Albert Oehlen/Julian Schnabel, exh. cat., Berlin: Galerie Max Hetzler and Holzwarth Publications, 2018, p. 7
Publisher: Galerie Max Hetzler Berlin | Paris | London / Holzwarth Publications Texts: Glenn Brown, Christian Malycha Publication date: 2018 Binding: Hardcover Dimensions: 30.5 x 24.5 x 1.5 cm Pages: 88 ISBN: 978-3-947127-08-5
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One of the most respected painters today, Albert Oehlen (b. 1954) constantly questions the means and methods of painting. His practice raises a sense of awareness of the medium, which he aims to reinvent and reshape, always in opposition to traditional hierarchies. Oehlen has been continually colliding various styles, orders and media in his work since the 1980s, 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
Goethestraße 2/3, Berlin
2018
Exhibition page on maxhetzler.com
€ 20.00
