Albert Oehlen

Nov 17

Albert Oehlen is an influential contemporary painter working in an eclectic variety of techniques and imagery. Interested in exploring the medium as a genre, his paintings have cycled ceaselessly from abstraction to realism, often serving as a parody or imitation of traditional painting models. His most notorious works include his so-called Bad Paintings series which includes a 1986 portrait of Adolf Hitler, as well as his Computer Paintings which explored abstract imagery derived from an early-1990s laptop. “Qualities that I want to see brought together: delicacy and coarseness, color and vagueness, and, underlying them all, a base note of hysteria,” he said of painting. Born on September 17, 1954 in Krefeld, Germany, he is the brother of fellow artist Markus Oehlen. Studying under Sigmar Polke at the Hochschule für Bildende Künste, he graduated in 1978 and received his first solo show in 1981 at Galerie Max Hetzler in Berlin. The artist served as a professor of painting at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf from 2000 to 2009. A major retrospective of his work “Albert Oehlen: Home and Garden,” was held in 2015 at the New Museum of Contemporary Art in New York. He currently lives and works in Bühlen, Switzerland. Today, Oehlen’s works are held in the collections of The Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Musée d’Art Moderne et Contemporain in Strasbourg, and the Cleveland Museum of Art, among others.