Artist of the day

Saturday, December 21, 2024

Artist of the Day, December 21, 2024: Albert Oehlen, a German painter, installation artist, and musician (#2183)

Albert Oehlen (1954) is a German painter, installation artist and musician. He lives and works in Bühler, Switzerland and Segovia, Spain.

Born in Krefeld, West Germany, Oehlen moved to Berlin in 1977, where he worked as a waiter and decorator with his friend, the artist Werner Büttner. He graduated from the University of Fine Arts of Hamburg in 1978. Along with Martin Kippenberger and Georg Herold, Oehlen was a member of Berlin "bad boy" group.

Influenced by other German painters such as Georg Baselitz, Sigmar Polke and Gerhard Richter, Oehlen focuses on the process of painting itself. During the 1980s he began combining abstract and figurative elements of painting in his works, as part of a reaction to the prevailing Neo-Expressionist aesthetic of the time. In the following years, he worked within self-imposed, often absurd, parameters. He used only gray tones for his "Grey" paintings and limited himself to red, yellow, and blue for another series of what he calls "bad" paintings that included his infamous 1986 portrait of Adolf Hitler. In his paintings of the late 1990s, each piece consists of smears and lines of paint Oehlen brushed and sprayed over collaged imagery that had been transferred to canvas by the type of gigantic inkjet printers used to manufacture billboards.

In Oehlen's recent work, flat, figurative cut-outs-all the products of computer-aided design (CAD), and gestural strokes of oil paint trade places in the service of collage. In his recent Finger Paintings, color-blocked advertisements are an extension of the canvas, providing fragmented, ready made surfaces for Oehlen's visceral markings, made with his hands, as well as brushes, rags, and spray-cans.

In 2014 Skarstedt Gallery, New York hosted Oehlen' "Fabric Paintings" exhibition, featuring fourteen of the twenty paintings made from 1992 to 1996, and mostly kept in his studio. In 2015 Oehlen had his first major New York exhibition, "Albert Oehlen: Home and Garden" at the New Museum of Contemporary Art, a self-portraits selection from the 1980s and 1990s.

In 2013 ArtDaily described Oehlen as "one of the most influential, but also one of the most controversial of contemporary painters". Art curator Achim Hochdörfer explained that “It is as if Oehlen were continually out-tricking painting. The intrinsic and extrinsic enemies of painting — avant-garde and new technologies — are brought into the picture, and clichés like beauty or virtuosity are smuggled in cunningly". Art critic Peter Schjeldahl wrote on his work in 2015: "There is as much philosophical heft to what he won't allow himself, in the ways of order and balance, as in the stuttering virtuosities of what he does. His pictures possess no unity of composition, only unremitting energy. Everywhere your eye goes, it finds things to engage it; they just don't add up."

© 2024. All content on this blog is protected by international copyright laws All images are copyrighted © by Albert Oehlen or assignee. Apart from fair dealing for the purpose of private study, research, criticism or review as permitted under the Copyright Act, the use of any image from this site is prohibited unless prior written permission is obtained. All images used for illustrative purposes only

Albert Oehlen

Albert Oehlen at work

Untitled, 1982

Untitled, 1983

Untitled, 1985

Albert Oehlen Dinge, 1987

Abstraktes Bild V, November 1988

Vorwärts, 1988

Porsche Targa, 1989

Untitled, 1989

Untitled, 1992

Untitled, 1993

Apples and Newspapers, 1994

Arbeiten, 1985

Captain Jack, 1997

Deathoknocko, 2001

Untitled (Do not Adopt or Destroy), 2001

Lämmle live, 2004

Treppe, 2006

Untitled, 2008

Conduction II, 2009

Rich, 2009

Untitled, 2009

Untitled, 2012

Untitled, 2014

Untitled, 2017

Untitled, 2019

Friday, December 20, 2024

Artist of the Day, December 20, 2024: Kayode Ojo, an emerging American photographer, installation artist (#2182)

Twenty eighteen was a breakout year for artist Kayode Ojo, (1990) who had solo shows in Paris, Berlin, New York and Dallas. The son of Nigerian immigrants, he grew up in Tennessee and studied photography at the School of Visual Arts in New York.

Along with photos, he creates installations inspired by film and theater, like a piece in his Paris show called “A Straight Razor in the First Act.” A clock and a straight razor sit on a chrome and marble table, referencing a tradition in theater where a gun seen in the first act goes off in the third.

Ojo’s sculptural installations transform aspirational clothing and furniture into uncanny scenes. Wigs pour from champagne bottles. Pants hang upside down from a music stand, the crotch spilling glittering jewelry onto a mirror on the floor. Shiny surfaces are used to distract attention from the fact that these precariously assembled objects are all fakes — fast fashion and design knockoffs made to look glam. This past April, Manhattan-based Ojo mounted a solo show in Milan during Design Week, which came right on the heels of exhibitions in Dallas, Paris, Berlin, and New York. In the wake of this breakout run, PIN–UP paired the 29-year-old with one of his fans, architect and designer Rafael de Cárdenas, to discuss luxury, success, discomfort, and object-driven storytelling.

© 2024. All content on this blog is protected by international copyright laws All images are copyrighted © by Kayode Ojo or assignee. Apart from fair dealing for the purpose of private study, research, criticism or review as permitted under the Copyright Act, the use of any image from this site is prohibited unless prior written permission is obtained. All images used for illustrative purposes only