Albert Oehlen

19 October - 30 November 2002

Albert Oehlen, German artist born in 1954 in Krefeld, Germany. He lives between Germany and Spain. He teaches at the Kunstakademie in Düsseldorf. Albert Oehlen is one of the most recognized artists of the German scene.
Albert Oehlen is not the painter of a single style, one is always surprised by the diversity of his language, between abstraction and figuration, always combined with a very diverse color palette. In recent years, he has also developed a series of works constructed from images and computer montages.

The Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art in Strasbourg is organizing the first major exhibition of Albert Oehlen in a French institution. It will show very large paintings (3 m x 3 m) mixing painting and computer constructions.
The Galerie Nathalie Obadia, whose exhibition is Albert Oehlen's third, will show new works on the same theme (October 19 - November 30, 2002).

In recent years, with the emergence of a new generation of German painters, we can see how Albert Oehlen has been able to inspire artists such as Franck Ackermann, Michel Majerus, Frank Nitsche, Daniel Richter and Thomas Scheibitz.

Fabrice Hergott gave the most exact definition of Albert Oehlen's work: "The eye figures to see, but in the movement where it recognizes an object, it abstracts it, places it immediately in a spatial, cultural, affective structure which is none other than its memory, or the invisible link that it weaves between the different elements of its memory. Abstract and figurative are two mobile and retractable concepts which are permanently held one in the other rather than one against the other. "

Fabrice Hergott
Text published in Albert Oehlen, Editions Taschen, 1995