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Almond, Darren: All Things Pass

Almond, Darren: Terminus

Almond, Darren / Blechen, Carl: Landscapes

Andreani, Giulia

Appel, Karel

Arnolds, Thomas

Brown, Glenn

Brown, Glenn: And Thus We Existed

Butzer, André

Butzer, André: Exhibitions Galerie Max Hetzler 2003–2022

Chinese Painting from No Name to Abstraction: Collection Ralf Laier

Choi, Cody: Mr. Hard Mix Master. Noblesse Hybridige

Demester, Jeremy

Demester, Jérémy: Fire Walk With Me

Dienst, Rolf-Gunter: Frühe Bilder und Gouachen

Dupuy-Spencer, Celeste: Fire But the Clouds Never Hung So Low Before

Ecker, Bogomir: You’re NeverAlone

Elmgreen and Dragset: After Dark

Elrod, Jeff

Elrod, Jeff: ESP

Fischer, Urs

Förg, Günther

Förg, Günther: Forty Drawings 1993

Förg, Günther: Works from the Friedrichs Collection

Galerie Max Hetzler: Remember Everything

Galerie Max Hetzler: 1994–2003

Gréaud, Loris: Ladi Rogeurs  Sir Loudrage  Glorius Read

Hains, Raymond

Hains, Raymond: Venice

Hatoum, Mona (Kunstmuseum
St. Gallen)

Eric Hattan Works. Werke Œuvres 1979–2015

Hattan, Eric: Niemand ist mehr da

Herrera, Arturo: Series

Herrera, Arturo: Boy and Dwarf

Hilliard, John: Accident and Design

Holyhead, Robert

Horn, Rebecca / Hayden Chisholm: Music for Rebecca Horn's installations

Horn, Rebecca: 10 Werke / 20 Postkarten – 10 Works / 20 Postcards

Huang Rui: Actual Space, Virtual Space

Josephsohn, Hans

Kahrs, Johannes: Down ’n out

Koons, Jeff

Kowski, Uwe: Paintings and Watercolors

La mia ceramica

Larner, Liz

Li Nu: Peace Piece

Mahn, Inge

Marepe

Mikhailov, Boris: Temptation of Life

Mosebach, Martin / Rebecca Horn: Das Lamm (The Lamb)

Neto, Ernesto: From Sebastian to Olivia

Niemann, Christoph

Oehlen, Albert: Luckenwalde

Oehlen, Albert: Mirror Paintings

Oehlen, Albert: Spiegelbilder. Mirror Paintings 1982–1990

Oehlen, Albert: Interieurs

Oehlen, Albert: unverständliche braune Bilder

Oehlen, Pendleton, Pope.L, Sillman

Oehlen, Albert | Schnabel, Julian

Phillips, Richard: Early Works on Paper

Prince, Richard: Super Group

Reyle, Anselm: After Forever

Riley, Bridget

Riley, Bridget: Circles and Discs

Riley, Bridget: Paintings and Related Works 1983–2010

Riley, Bridget: The Stripe Paintings

Riley, Bridget: Paintings 1984–2020

Roth, Dieter & Iannone, Dorothy

Scully, Sean: Dark Yet

True Stories: A Show Related to an Era – The Eighties

Tunga: Laminated Souls

Tursic, Ida & Mille, Wilfried

de Waal, Edmund: Irrkunst

Wang, Jiajia: Elegant, Circular, Timeless

Warren, Rebecca

Wool, Christopher: Westtexaspsychosculpture

Wool, Christopher: Road

Wool, Christopher: Yard

Wool, Christopher: Swamp

Wool, Christopher: Bad Rabbit

Zeng Fanzhi: Old and New. Paintings 1988–2023

Zhang Wei (2017)

Zhang Wei (2019)

Zhang Wei / Wang Luyan: A Conversation with Jia Wei

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Albert Oehlen: Interieurs
Text Michael Bracewell


English
Hardcover
30 x 32 cm
32 pages
16 color illustrations
978-3-935567-67-1
35.00 Euro

 

This book presents a recent series of large-format collage paintings by Albert Oehlen, who uses cheerily cheap advertising posters to build compositions that reveal themselves as interiors only on second gaze: edges of walls and floors, the elegant curve of a designer chair. Thus the artist not only conflates the high and low but also shows how the loud commercial messages have invaded our private space.

 

SO MUCH OF EVERYTHING!
(excerpt from the essay by Michael Bracewell)


Prices, water, a smiling swimming lady, lager, peas, office blocks, burgers, tyres, headphones, tonic water, happy restaurant people, hair, TV, smiling young woman, sunshade, jeans, steak, spine, hat stand, handsome man, plastic pig, white lingerie.


These are some of the images from advertising posters out of which Albert Oehlen has made his series of large-scale collage paintings, Interieurs. Their relation to Pop is ambiguous, ambivalent, but apparent – a sub-sonic pulse. They are composed in such a manner that their visual rhythm can appear at once brusque and complex: the viewer seems to experience a bombardment of typography, colours, shapes, and fragments of recognizable imagery, some cut by the artist into a silhouette form of human figures. The visual sensory impact of these canvases is therefore also immediate, vivid, visceral, and at times, or cumulatively, disorienting and somewhat neurasthenic. At the same time, there is rich emotional pleasure in these bombardments of colour and form, which appear to possess a dynamic momentum while also retaining a clarity and freshness, aerated by a bravura dialogue between space and form.


It seems interesting to imagine that a viewer is coming to these highly charged assemblages with no further information about the artist or his intentions. We first respond, perhaps, to the immediacy and visual clamour that these compositions communicate – rather as though a television had suddenly been turned on, at full volume.


Our next instinct might be to try to seek out some coherence and logic – our gaze searching the picture plane for some point to rest upon: a bottle of soda, a face, a word. Here and there in these collages we do find coherent, virtually intact images. They take their place within the dizzying arrangement of otherwise fragmented shards of imagery. When we focus on them, the commotion settles, and its reverse emerges: almost formalism, disciplined, deeply felt, its expressiveness controlled and thus articulated by a translation of the representational into the abstract. And here the discernment of ‘interiors’ may begin to emerge. These are glimpses, as opposed to insights: a dining room table, patio furniture, a wicker-backed chair. They take their place as though within a succession of garish broken perspectives comprised of blocks and shapes of sliced raw commercial graphics.


And thus, as we look further, the inchoate roar of the visual language begins to engage in part with the language of painterly Abstraction. That when we cease to search for any visual ‘meaning’ save that of tempo, form, colour and composition, we discover a compelling synthesis of found commercial imagery into contemplations of pure form – a balancing of the figurative machine-made image, the semiotic, the aesthetic, the anthropological and a form of modern poetics.

 

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In collaboration with Galerie Max Hetzler, Berlin