Albert Oehlen Shows ' Good Paintings ' at Whitechapel

Saturday, 12 August 2006 09:20

London - The Whitechapel presents the first major UK show of an artist bringing painting back to the forefront of contemporary art.

Albert Oehlen is the first survey of the work of a painter who engages directly with the history of painting.  Rebellious, discordant and allusive, his paintings are driven by an explosive collision of line, color and form.  Yet behind their often chaotic appearance lies an intense investigation of the limits of painting, that has influenced a generation of artists, including Chris Ofili, Peter Doig and Glenn Brown.

Focusing on exposing art’s failures, Oehlen borrows from traditional genres and techniques to show the limits of abstraction and representation, describing his work as ‘post-non-representational’.  Co-organized with Arnolfini, Bristol, the exhibition surveys his work since 1988 and explores how Oehlen’s irreverent and playful work has pushed the vocabulary of painting - color, form, composition and space – into a deliberately ugly anti-aesthetic.

Born in Krefeld, Germany, in 1954, Albert Oehlen studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in Hamburg with Sigmar Polke and came to prominence in the early 1980s alongside Martin Kippenberger, with whom he often collaborated.  Working in the aftermath of conceptual art’s rejection of the medium of painting, Oehlen was influenced by German painters such as Georg Baselitz, Sigmar Polke and Gerhard Richter.  His work focuses on the process of painting itself, making visible its fundamental elements rather than exploring painting as autobiographical expression.  ‘No magic, no science, no excuses’, Oehlen has said, ‘I want an art where you see how it’s made, not what the artist means but the traces of production.’  By making visual references to styles and methods artists have used to compensate for art’s failings, his work is based on the possibilities of creative function rather than aesthetics.