Albert Oehlen
The renown painter true to his Neo-Expressionist roots.
Albert Oehlen wants you to feel overwhelmed. His works are intentionally imbued with intense emotionality.
Oehlen developed his artistic style while attending art school in Hamburg, Germany, where he befriended Neo-Expressionist and Neue Wilde artists such as Martin Kippenberger, George Herold and Jörg Immendorff.
These young German artists sought to rebel against the minimal and highly conceptual aesthetics that had dominated painting in the 1970s; instead they created art that implemented intense colors and violent emotionality to depict recognizable objects, sometimes abstractly.
“Whatever it is, I still believe in the unpredictable, in an artist who just has something and overwhelms you with something that you didn’t even ask for. I believe that in the sort of wrong moment there comes a time when someone who no one wanted, just does it . . .” — Albert Oehlen (Interview Magazine)
Oehlen has maintained the trademark style of a Neo-Expressionist painter while examining a range of subject matter and gaining incredible international acclaim throughout his career. Most recently, he has focused his works on the inclusion of low-grade advertising materials.
His series of advertising-sourced images were the subject of a 2012 solo show at Luhring Augustine in New York. Oehlen identified the political implications of using commercial materials:
“I’m working with advertisement material — posters, big ones, just trashy stuff. And I’m trying to make these pictures have very trashy, cheap elements in them, things that will evoke feelings from the old left — left-wing protest feelings, anticommercial emotion. ” — Albert Oehlen
However, for Oehlen the real challenge comes not in the inclusion of such low-grade materials but in forgetting “all about that and mak[ing] a nice painting,” still true to his characteristic aesthetic.
Oehlen lives and works between Switzerland, Berlin, and La Palma, Spain. His work is part of the permanent collections of the Tate in London and MoMA in New York. He has been featured in solo exhibitions at the Gagosian Gallery in Rome, New York and Geneva, Luhring Augustine in New York and will be featured in an upcoming exhibit at the New Museum in New York (opening on June 10). He has also been included in a group show at the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao.
You can now acquire an Albert Oehlen painting at artlist.co.
This post was written with the help of Alice Mahoney.
