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

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."

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