On the occasion of its fifth collaboration with Albert Oehlen, Galerie Nathalie Obadia is very pleased to present a selection of recent works by the German artist, considered one of the most important painters of his generation.
Heir to Gerhard Richter, Sigmar Polke or Georg Baselitz, Albert Oehlen questions and experiments with the multiple possibilities of painting. After the major exhibition devoted to him at the Carré d'Art in Nîmes this summer, this new exhibition at the Galerie Nathalie Obadia is an opportunity to show the most recent works of the artist, who has voluntarily reduced his chromatic palette to black and white in order to engage, with great mastery, in a balancing act between geometric forms and free figures.
In the continuity of the Computers paintings - a series initiated at the end of the 90's in which the artist tries to correct the pixelated image of our screens to end up paradoxically with a hand-painted image - Albert Oehlen presents five very large paintings and a series of ten drawings under the title "Conduction". In fact, combining rigorous composition and absolute freedom of line, this new series offers itself to the viewer as the visual equivalent of a scientific phenomenon. From one painting to another, a thermal agitation is transmitted from one to another, like a molecule or an atom which, in its vibration, gives up part of its kinetic energy to its neighbor. This vital and ironic pulsation echoes the artist's working method: "The composition is made as I go along. I twist, I push, I pull. I couldn't work from a drawing. So, I don't start by elaborating the composition and then apply the colors. Everything is done at the same time.
In this new series by Albert Oehlen, we find all the controversies that animate a work that keeps oscillating between great painting and bad painting, formalism and abstract expressionism, naivety and sophistication.
*Extract from an interview with Judicael Lavrador. Catalog Albert Oelhen, Carré d'art de Nîmes, published by Archibooks 2011.
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. In France, the artist has benefited until October 9 from a major exhibition at the Carré d'Art in Nîmes after having been honored by the Musée d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris in 2009, with "Abstract Reality".