Artists

Albert Oehlen

Press release

Galerie Max Hetzler is pleased to announce Schweinekubismus, a solo exhibition of new works by Albert Oehlen, at Potsdamer Straße 77-87, in Berlin.

Known for his exploration of the means and methods of art, Albert Oehlen often applies self-imposed formal constraints to critically examine the history and conventions of contemporary art, whilst giving himself something to paint against. He combines expressive gesture with a surrealist attitude, overriding the search for constant forms and meanings.

In his paintings, Oehlen takes up details and isolated themes from existing groups of works, including the tree motif which has fascinated the artist as a form and system since the early 1980s, the ‘John Graham Remixes’ (1997–ongoing), the ‘u.b.B.’ paintings (2020–2022), and the ‘Ömega Man’ series (2021–ongoing). This marks an inward-facing shift in Oehlen’s practice as his paintings become self-referential. Here, the act of transferring the images into a new state is of greater importance than the source material. There is no separation between abstraction and figuration, improvisation and control; there are only the endless possibilities of the medium.