Drawings is a pop-up exhibition by Albert Oehlen including a floor-to-ceiling, site-specific wall drawing; a recent painting; and a large work on paper, on view in a space adjacent to Gagosian’s Beverly Hills gallery.
Central to Oehlen’s oeuvre is the innate freedom of the creative act. In this exhibition, he expresses this with erratic lines of various widths and weights that intertwine and spread across the space, which can be entered or viewed from the street. In a large work on paper, sparse gestures in black ink dance across a bright white ground. Though it precedes Oehlen’s Baumbilder (Tree Paintings), the work possesses a similar sense of weightlessness, as if the lines might float out of the frame to join the others on the walls. The seemingly infinite potential of the line is illustrated further in a recent painting, attesting to Oehlen’s deft ability to shift between media, translating his gestures as he goes.
The exhibition is open Monday–Saturday, 10am–6pm. It will also be open Sunday, February 17, 10am–6pm, to coincide with the gallery’s presentation at Frieze Los Angeles. gagosian.com
About The Artist
Albert Oehlen was born in 1954 in Krefeld, Germany, and currently lives and works in Switzerland. Collections include the Museum of Modern Art, New York; Cleveland Museum of Art; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; Museum of Contemporary Art North Miami, FL; Broad, Los Angeles; Museum für Moderne Kunst Frankfurt am Main, Germany; Centro de Arte Contemporáneo de Málaga, Spain; Centre Pompidou, Paris; Tate, London; Istanbul Modern; and Museo Jumex, Mexico City. Recent institutional exhibitions include Museo di Capodimonte, Naples, Italy (2009); Réalité Abstraite, Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris (2009); Terpentin, Kunstmuseum Bonn, Germany (2012); Albert Oehlen: Malerei, Museum Moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig Wien, Vienna (2013); 55th Biennale di Venezia (2013); Die 5000 Finger von Dr. Ö, Museum Wiesbaden, Germany (2014); Home and Garden, New Museum, New York (2015); An Old Painting in Spirit, Kunsthalle Zürich (2015); Behind the Image, Guggenheim Bilbao, Spain (2017); Woods near Oehle, Cleveland Museum of Art (2017); and Cows by the Water, Palazzo Grassi, Venice (2018–19).
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