Exhibition: Albert Oehlen - New Paintings

Gagosian presents an exhibition of new paintings by Albert Oehlen.

For his first show at the gallery in London since 2016, Oehlen continues to explore the rich possibilities and the future of painting. He riffs on fragments, forms, and entire motifs of his imagination in a manner that echoes both the sampling of a musical composition and the mechanisms of cinematography. These references are the vehicles for vivid painterly invention.

Oehlen’s images are divided, repeated, and distorted to conjure a new pictorial narrative. His original source is reimagined; it is at times decipherable, and at others annihilated. The subject of these paintings is, arguably, unimportant; it is the act of transferring images into a new state that is now significant. The result is sometimes a regular, repeated composition that follows from one section to the next. Yet in other paintings, he chooses much more irregular twists and turns, filled with different possible shapes and endings. There is no barrier between abstraction and figuration, improvisation and control, only the endless potential of the medium.

Oehlen is best known for using various modes of painting within the same canvas to disrupt the histories and conventions of modernism. Championing self-consciously amateurish “bad” painting, he infuses spontaneous and expressive gestures with Surrealist attitude, rejecting the quest for stable form and meaning. Combining graphic brushstrokes, painterly drips, unexpected colours, and contrasting textures, Oehlen tests the limits of both coherence and legibility.

New Paintings is accompanied by a catalogue which includes an essay by curator and art historian Reto Thüring.