Galerie Nathalie Obadia is very pleased to present recent works by Albert Oehlen. This is the fourth collaboration with Galerie Nathalie Obadia following exhibitions at the Musée de Strasbourg in 2002 and the Frac Auvergne in 2005. Albert Oehlen is considered one of the most important painters of his generation. Heir to Gerhard Richter, Sigmar Polke or Baselitz, he questions and experiments with the multiple possibilities of painting. A student of Sigmar Polke, contemporary and friend of Martin Kippenberger who died in 1997, he remains a reference for the younger generation of German painters, such as Daniel Richter and Jonathan Meese, as well as for others in Europe and the USA.
On the occasion of this exhibition, Albert Oehlen shows a set of paintings and collages combining references to advertisements and media from different countries where he works such as Spain and Germany. These associations of images and texts appearing as free assemblages are in fact constructions of pictorial languages between abstraction and figuration. Humor is always present in his work and one also recognizes a rhythm close to the contemporary music which fascinates him. We also find the pictorial approaches of Francis Picabia of the Dada movement or Fernand Léger. The consumer society is approached in a mixture of abundant cultures. With the classical brush and the "sharp" eye of the observant artist, the works are conceived with a very personal energy. In his research, Albert Oehlen plays with the speed of expression of the images while concentrating on the colors and constructions, he often returns to the works already started to find the balance of each one with a mastered generosity which makes all the originality of his art. In each of Albert Oehlen's works, we find all the controversy between great painting and "bad painting", between formalism and expressionist figuration, or between a certain "naivety" and sophistication of treatment.
Born in 1954 in Krefeld, Germany, Albert Oehlen lives and works between Switzerland and Spain. He is a professor at the Kunstakademie in Düsseldorf. His international exhibitions include retrospectives at the Whitechapel in London and Arnolfini in Bristol in 2006, MOCA in Miami in 2005 and solo exhibitions at the Kunsthalle Nurenberg in 2005, the Secession in Vienna in 2004, the Musée Cantonal in Lausanne in 2004, the Musée d'Art Contemporain in Strasbourg in 2002, the Kestner-Gesellscahft in Hanover in 2001 and the Kunsthalle in Basel in 1997.