Albert Oehlen
Galerie Max Hetzler / Holzwarth Publications, Berlin 2002 With texts by Stephan Schmidt-Wulffen and Martin Prinzhorn (German / English)
“There are no motifs that are thought-out or observed in the surroundings in the painting of Albert Oehlen or of Kippenberger and Büttner either. Their painting is not intended to portray any personal experiences but rather to present generalized experience in an exemplary manner. Therefore media deliver the themes. The images from newspapers and magazines represent a public interest and at the same time suggest a specific public with specific attitudes towards reality. ‘We didn’t want to denounce, but rather to inject ourselves into situations. Not to point our fingers to something but to create an ill-tempered mood ourselves.’ This coupling of picture, imagination and ideology has its origin in Pop-Art and connects the German artists with the American appropriation artists such as Sherrie Levine or Richard Prince. The German artists, however, expand the ideological work to include the form as well, so that they are concerned, not just with the ideology of the everyday world, but at the same time with the demontage of traditional artistic genres such as painting.” S. Schmidt-Wulffen, ‘To Claim That Things May Be Done Differently*’, in Albert Oehlen: Gemälde/Paintings 1980-1982, exh. cat., Berlin: Galerie Max Hetzler and Holzwarth Publications, 2002, p. 36
Publisher: Galerie Max Hetzler / Holzwarth Publications, Berlin Texts: Stephan Schmidt-Wulffen and Martin Prinzhorn Publication date: 2002 Binding: Hardcover Dimensions: 29,5 x 24,4 x 1,2 cm Pages: 47 ISBN: 3-935567-08-1
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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.’Anne Pontégnie, The history of abstraction seemed to be finished in Albert Oehlen, Galerie Max Hetzler and Holzwarth Publications, 2011
Artist page on maxhetzler.com
(catalogue "Paintings 1980–1982")
Zimmerstraße 90/91, Berlin-Mitte / Holzmarktstraße 15-18, Berlin-Mitte
2002
Exhibition page on maxhetzler.com
