Galerie Max Hetzler / Holzwarth Publications, Berlin 2000 With texts by Albert Oehlen and André Butzer (German / English / Spanish)
‘Pensive, melancholy, filled with skepticism, we look into the world. Our skull is burdened by a round mirror with an enormous red-striped beach ball, a symbol of inattentiveness, sex, dereliction of duty and idle chatter. Three naked zebras are led with stooped gait around this symbol. The first is led by Lady Pity, the second by a joker, the third by a ladies’ handbag filled with concrete. Behind a witch-like old woman waxing a handkerchief soiled all over with characters, we also see a small lion as a personification of pomposity and wrath, who presumably leads a fourth zebra, hidden by the handkerchief, around the circle. (...)’ A. Oehlen and A. Butzer, ‘Summary of Contents’, in Albert Oehlen: Inhaltsangabe (Summary of Contents/Sumario), Berlin: Galerie Max Hetzler and Holzwarth Publications, 2000, p. 96
Publisher: Galerie Max Hetzler / Holzwarth Publications, Berlin Texts: Albert Oehlen and André Butzer Publication date: 2000 Binding: Softcover Dimensions: 32.5 x 30 x 1.5 cm Pages: 111 ISBN: 3-00-006392-7
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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
Drei Bilder, ein Buch (Artist's book: Inhaltsangabe)
Zimmerstraße 89, Berlin-Mitte
1999
Exhibition page on maxhetzler.com