190 x 190 cm © Albert Oehlen Photo: Simon Vogel Courtesy Gagosian
Gagosian’s 2nd season of Artist Spotlight, a series that focuses on an individual artist for one week each month, presents a never-before-seen painting by Albert Oehlen. The featured work will be revealed at gagosian.com today Friday, April 9th and will be presented online for 48 hours only.
Oehlen’s improvisations on outwardly disparate methods and modes have made him a touchstone for a new generation of artists. Since his early espousal of self-consciously “bad” painting, he has continued to investigate the tensions between aesthetic order and chaos, deliberately sidestepping unified form in favour of a seemingly raw, yet highly considered painterly energy.
The featured painting, in acrylic and oil on canvas, was produced in Oehlen’s studio in Switzerland. In it, Oehlen aims to confront various painterly “habits,” consciously upending routine strategies in order to confound the viewer’s expectations around aesthetic taste and formal logic. In its conscious rejection of compositional harmony and stable meaning, the painting embodies Oehlen’s contrarian stance.
A new short film by Oehlen, with music by Tim Berresheim, will be presented for the first time as part of Artist Spotlight: Albert Oehlen. The film, shot in the artist’s studio can be watched on Gagosian Quarterly. Gagosian Quarterly also present a conversation between Oehlen and art historian and curator Mark Godfrey.
From April 22 to June 5, 2021, Gagosian Beverly Hills will present Tramonto Spaventoso, an exhibition of recent paintings by Oehlen, including four new paintings from an eight-part work of the same title. The first four paintings in the cycle were shown at the Serpentine Galleries, London, in 2019 – 20.
Artist Spotlight is a dynamic platform that enables artists to present their work in the digital realm, sharing their stories with a global audience online. The series, which launched in April 2020 in response to the pandemic crisis, is now in its second season. It is presented once a month as a regular part of Gagosian’s programming. Each instalment highlights the work of an individual artist through new editorial features and archival content, and new work is made available for sale at gagosian.com for forty-eight hours only.
