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Albert Oehlen:
Works on Paper

Galerie Max Hetzler (ed.)


Softcover with dust jacket
22 x 28 cm
38 pages
32 color illustrations
978-3-935567-90-9
out of print


Leaf through the book

 


 

The book presents works on paper that Albert Oehlen showed at Galerie Max Hetzler in Berlin 2016 along with a huge drawing made on a wall of the exhibition space. These are drawings that put the medium to the test: what is the meaning of a line, how do we recognize an artist’s personal thumbprint, where does drawing end and painting start?

 

In Oehlen’s sheet-sized ink drawings from 2014 the line circumscribes open forms in unruly little curls, suggesting figurative motifs and dissolving them in the next moment. These sheets confound our expectations that the artist’s stroke should describe or express something, which makes them all the more allusive. Oehlen’s large-format charcoal drawings from 2016, on the other hand, are abstractions the size of paintings, whose gestures use the full reach of the body. They are dance-like in their precarious balance of forms and highly resistant in the unpredictable behavior of the lines. The artist’s large wall drawing follows the same manner, but at three and a half against ten meters it explodes all reference to the human body. It subverts the idea of gestural drawing as a form of immediate expression, since its apparent spontaneity must be following an exact plan.

 

For us these works offer an opportunity to sharpen our gaze: each act of creation is immediately questioned by the artist and the medium’s use of reduction throws down a positive challenge to the viewer.

 

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Edited by Galerie Max Hetzler Berlin | Paris