Exhibition Poster 2018
“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
Exhibition Poster Albert Oehlen | Julian Schnabel Goethestraße 2/3, Berlin 14 March – 14 April 2018 Dimensions: 83.5 x 59 cm
€ 20.00
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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
‘[...] Schnabel is an extraordinary transformer, making history out of the everyday and making the familiar historic. It requires a body of work that has a strong metaphoric quality, an art that is about illusion, association, imagination. Even when his paintings are most abstract they are all about content, history, and emotion. Expertly installed and linked with their surroundings Schnabel's work can bring about the utmost stereophonic impact on the emotional state of all, the architecture, the painting, and the viewer.’ M. Hollein, Paintings and Their Surroundings in Summer. Julian Schnabel. Paintings 1976–2007, Skira, 2007
Goethestraße 2/3, Berlin
2018
Exhibition page on maxhetzler.com
€ 45.00