Since the 1980s, Albert Oehlen has operated in the charged field between abstraction and objectivity, where he always understands how to surprise the viewer by letting the pendulum swing unexpectedly in one direction or the other, or by hovering in a stable half-distance. He’s always questioning earlier results and arriving at fresh solutions, overcoming self-administered obstacles, like an integration of alien elements that let the outside world into his work, for example blunt advertising posters in his recent series of large-format pictures, or in his purely abstract finger paintings.

This book now returns to the point when the momentum of collage entered the abstract paintings, presenting eleven works dating from late 2004 to 2005. Oehlen’s often muddy palette is enlivened by streaks of fresh colors and blue patches of sky, fragments of landscapes or figures are collaged in to become pure form, or—like a shot of George W. Bush in one of the paintings—return the viewers gaze with an almost unbearable directness. As Anne Pontégnie points out in her essay, these works “combine experiments of the past with a momentum toward future experiment. Here is an energy in which pleasure, humor, and elegance rub shoulders with anger, ugliness, and brutality. At the heart of the storm, where you know you’re alive, it becomes possible to paint.”

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In collaboration with Galerie Max Hetzler, Berlin