Albert Oehlen: Malerei features six paintings made by the artist over thirty years from Fondation Louis Vuitton’s collection: Untitled (1992–2005), Mission Rohrfrei (1996), Rasieren (2005), Rock (2009), Untitled (2017) and Ömega Man 23 (2022). The works – many of which are on view for the first time – are presented as part of the Fondation’s Hors-les-murs, a programme which introduces the collection to international audiences in major cities. The presented selection reveals Oehlen’s long and boundary pushing engagement with the history of abstract painting.

Espace Louis Vuitton

Works by Mark Grotjahn, Albert Oehlen, Adam Pendleton, Rudolf Stingel and Christopher Wool are on view in A Dark Hymn: Highlights from the Hill Collection. Celebrating the five-year anniversary of the Hill Art Foundation, the exhibition examines the collection through the lens of Valentin Bousch’s 16th-century stained-glass window, The Creation and the Expulsion from Paradise, which is permanently installed in the Foundation’s Chelsea building. The exhibition places the Bousch window in conversation with other significant works in the collection, spanning from the Renaissance through to the contemporary moment.

Hill Art Foundation

When Albert Oehlen set out as a painter in the late 1970s, it was a time out of joint. Given German history, terrorism, 'No Future,' and Nineteen-Eighty-Four as well as the permanent threat of all-out nuclear war, painting could not pretend that the world was safe and sound. As the world shattered, so did painting. As all symbols, signs, and means were damaged and devoid of meaning, he unmasked painting in all its dubiousness. How is one to tell authentic gesture from blunt reproduction, genuine emotion from a disillusioned readymade copy? Oehlen accepts the shattering and transforms it into the basis of his painting. He invents an overtly fragmented image, which is as disoriented as the reality, in which it partakes. Traces, stimuli, and after-images of reality flash stroboscopically across his canvases. It is through this attitude that he has achieved an exceptional degree of painterly liberty, With each new image, he updates and renews the possibilities and impossibilities of painting, thereby granting an appropriate form to a diffuse reality. 

For the first time, Albert Oehlen has created an expansive all-over installation, spanning the entirety of the Friedrichs Foundation’s exhibition hall, into which 12 paintings have been playfully integrated.

Friedrichs Foundation

Albert Oehlen’s monumental sculpture Ömega Man, 2023, is now on view to the public in Weidingen, where it emerges from the vast landscape of the Südeifel. Its simplified form and slightly raised steel bars, recessed into their concrete casting, evoke the lightness of a drawing. Here, the persistent importance of the line in Oehlen’s work becomes evident, appearing simultaneously curved and controlled. In this work, the artist uses elements which are both abstract and figurative to critically examine the history and conventions of contemporary art, all the while continuing to acknowledge the importance of classical models. Massive yet fragile in its isolation, Oehlen's Ömega Man appears like a monument from the future. Omega, the last letter of the Greek alphabet, is here written with an umlaut, thereby referring to the artist’s own name. 

Stiftung zur Förderung Zeitgenössischer Kunst in Weidingen

The new catalogue published on the occasion of the group exhibition Oehlen, Pendleton, Pope.L, Sillman, on view at Galerie Max Hetzler, Berlin from 4 November 2021 until 29 January 2022, is now available for purchase. Alongside installation views and high-resolution images, the publication includes a conversation between Amy Sillman, Adam Pendleton, and Isabelle Graw.

Learn more