‘Prices, water, a smiling swimming lady, lager, peas, office blocks, burgers, tyres, headphones, tonic water, happy restaurant people, hair, TV, smiling young woman, sunshade, jeans, steak, spine, hat stand, handsome man, plastic pig, white lingerie.
These are some of the images from advertising posters out of which Albert Oehlen has made his series of large-scale collage paintings, Interieurs. Their relation to Pop is ambiguous, ambivalent, but apparent – a sub-sonic pulse. They are composed in such a manner that their visual rhythm can appear at once brusque and complex: the viewer seems to experience a bombardment of typography, colours, shapes and fragments of recognizable imagery, some cut by the artist into a silhouette form of human figures. The visual sensory impact of these canvases is therefore also immediate, vivid, visceral and at times, or cumulatively, disorienting and somewhat neurasthenic. At the same time, there is rich emotional pleasure in these bombardments of colour and form, which appear to possess a dynamic momentum while also retaining a clarity and freshness, aerated by a bravura dialogue between space and form.’
M. Bracewell, ‘So Much of Everything! Concerning the Art of Albert Oehlen’, in Albert Oehlen: Interieurs, exh. cat., Berlin: Galerie Max Hetzler and Holzwarth Publications, 2013, p. 3
