Galerie Max Hetzler Berlin | Paris, 2016 With a poem by Howard Nemerov
Albert Oehlen’s graphic work forms a central part of his multifaceted oeuvre. Even though the affinity and interaction with his paintings is visible, Oehlen’s works on paper distinguish themselves from his paintings and mark an independent category. Restless dashes, drawn with ink, form complex arrangements on white paper. Black lines are crossing and overlaying each other, condensing into tortuous bundles before fleeing into the void. Upon small format Oehlen develops works that occupy and survey this particular space. Beside abstract elements also human forms – bodies or mere single limbs – can be perceived, spreading over the sheet and immediately dissolving into abstraction.
Publisher: Galerie Max Hetzler Berlin | Paris Poem: Howard Nemerov Publication date: 2016 Binding: Softcover Dimensions: 28 x 22 x 0.5 cm Pages: 37 ISBN: 978-3-935567-90-9
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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
Works on Paper
Goethestraße 2/3, Berlin
2016
Exhibition page on maxhetzler.com
