Albert Oehlen is a modern German artist who creates his abstract paintings in the New European Painting style and in New Casualism. The artist’s main technic is the combining of multiple mediums and painting instruments in one picture, such as brushes, silk-screen, computer, collage and even fingers.
The artist also tried his hand in music.
Background
Albert Oehlen was born on September 17, 1954, in Krefeld, Germany. He was a son of a graphic designer. His mother died of complications related to the ear infection when Oehlen was a four-year-old boy.
In his childhood, little Albert was surrounded by the world of drawings. His father illustrated children’s books, stories and created cartoons, despite, there were the reproductions of a Picasso, a van Gogh, and a Beckmann in the house which Albert loved much. At the age of twenty-three, the artist moved to Berlin.
Education
At the beginning of his artstic education, Albert Oehlen was taught by a German postmodernist Joseph Beuys. Then, Albert entered the University of Fine Arts (Hochschule für bildende Künste) in Hamburg in 1974 where he had studied under the tutelage of Sigmar Polke for seven years.
Albert Oehlen’s artistic journey started in 1977 when he left his native Krefeld and relocated to Berlin. At the capital of Germany, Albert earned his living as a waiter and decorator along with his friend, the artist Werner Büttner.
The artist presented his early works at the exhibitions in 1978 along with his brother Markus. Since this time, Oehlen was involved in the Cologne art scene and joined such art associations as the Neue Wilde (“Wild Youth”) and Lord Jim Lodge. The first personal exhibition of Oehlen's works was organized by the Galerie Max Hetzler in 1981.
The same period, the artist began to combine the elements of figurative and abstract art in his creations, such as Malerei über Malerei (Painting about painting). Two years later after his first exhibitions, Oehlen with his brother and Werner Büttner founded the Kirche der Unterschiedlichkeit. In the association, were organized various happenings often on political themes.
The next period of Oehlen’s career was marked by the use of monotone palette, often grey, as in his Grey series paintings, or blue, as in his portrait of Adolf Hitler (1986).
In 1992, Oehlen established a studio in a Spanish town Segovia where he started to incorporate in his art the elements produced by electronic instruments, such as inkjet printers or computers. So, appeared the series called Computer Paintings. Among the personal exhibitions of this period were the shows at Galeria Juana de Aizpuru in Madrid (1996 and 1999), Galerie Gisela Capitain in Cologne (1997), Margo Leavin Gallery in Los Angeles and at Galerie Mikael Anderson in Copenhagen, both latter in 1998.
Despite his painting activity, Albert Oehlen was fascinated by music and even established in the 1990s his personal music label called Leiterwagen where he experimented with electronic style. Oehlen had played for some time in the bands Red Krayola and Van Oehlen.
In 2000, the artist became a professor of painting at the Academy of Arts in Düsseldorf, Germany. He had held the position for nine years. At the same time, came his series of Self-portraits, including Frühstück Now (Self-Portrait), Self-Portrait with Open Mouth and Self-Portrait as a Dutch Woman which he presented to the public in 2002.
One of the artist’s recent projects, named Finger Paintings is based on computer-aided design, finger strokes made with oil and collages.
In 2013, he had a retrospective of his 80 works dated from the 1980s to 2005 at Museum of Modern Art (Museum Moderner Kunst, or MUMOK), Vienna. One more retrospective of artworks created between 1992 to 1996 called Fabric Paintings took place at the Skarstedt Gallery in London a year later. In 2015, the artist had his debut exhibition in New York City at the New Museum of Contemporary Art dubbed Albert Oehlen: Home and Garden where his collection of self-portraits was demonstrated.
Among the recent shows, Albert Oehlen had, were Behind the Image at the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain (2016–17) and Woods near Oehle at Cleveland Museum of Art (2016–17).
Albert Oehlen is a talented contemporary painter who has exhibited his artworks often compared with the art of David Salle in various prestigious galleries and museums in Germany, Italy, France, Denmark, Austria, Greece, United States and the United Kingdom.
One of his paintings, called Loa, is included in the permanent collection of the Tate Gallery in London.
Albert Oehlen’s personal sales record attained more than three million dollars for his painting Self Portrait with Palette bought at the Christie's auction on March 2017.
Quotations:
'I want to make beautiful paintings. But I don't make beautiful paintings by putting beautiful paint on a canvas with a beautiful motif. It just doesn't work. I expect my paintings to be strong and surprising.'
"If someone stands in front of one of my paintings and says, 'This is just a mess', the word 'just' is not so good, but 'mess' might be right. Why not a mess? If it makes you say, 'Wow, I've never seen anything like that', that's beautiful.'
"If someone stands in front of one of my paintings and says, 'This is just a mess', the word 'just' is not so good, but 'mess' might be right. Why not a mess? If it makes you say, 'Wow, I've never seen anything like that', that's beautiful."
"There are two kinds of mistakes. The one mistake is the 'bad' picture. Of course, I've made pictures that I don't like or like less than others. The other mistake is the positive mistake where I say I can afford this mistake because this is not the meaning of the picture. I like these mistakes or these errors but with them I try to prove that the subject or the concept of the picture is on something else-in this case the mistakes are good."
"This is the main lie, the main misunderstanding, in art, that you can use it as something to pleasure the eye as an organ. This idea is really a thing that is around. Or the thought that you could enjoy art, really directly enjoy it."
Membership
Lord Jim Lodge
,
Germany
Personality
Quotes from others about the person
"One of the most influential, but also one of the most controversial of contemporary painters." ArtDaily Internet Newspaper.
Connections
Albert Oehlen’s wife name is Esther Freund. The couple has three children.
