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Almond, Darren: All Things Pass

Almond, Darren: Terminus

Almond, Darren / Blechen, Carl: Landscapes

Andreani, Giulia

Appel, Karel

Arnolds, Thomas

Bonnet, Louise

Brown, Glenn

Brown, Glenn: And Thus We Existed

Butzer, André

Butzer, André: Exhibitions Galerie Max Hetzler 2003–2022

Chinese Painting from No Name to Abstraction: Collection Ralf Laier

Choi, Cody: Mr. Hard Mix Master. Noblesse Hybridige

Demester, Jeremy

Demester, Jérémy: Fire Walk With Me

Dienst, Rolf-Gunter: Frühe Bilder und Gouachen

Dupuy-Spencer, Celeste: Fire But the Clouds Never Hung So Low Before

Ecker, Bogomir: You’re NeverAlone

Elmgreen and Dragset: After Dark

Elrod, Jeff

Elrod, Jeff: ESP

Fischer, Urs

Förg, Günther

Förg, Günther: Forty Drawings 1993

Förg, Günther: Works from the Friedrichs Collection

Galerie Max Hetzler: Remember Everything

Galerie Max Hetzler: 1994–2003

Gréaud, Loris: Ladi Rogeurs  Sir Loudrage  Glorius Read

Grosse, Katharina: Spectrum without Traces

Hains, Raymond

Hains, Raymond: Venice

Hatoum, Mona (Kunstmuseum
St. Gallen)

Eric Hattan Works. Werke Œuvres 1979–2015

Hattan, Eric: Niemand ist mehr da

Herrera, Arturo: Series

Herrera, Arturo: Boy and Dwarf

Hilliard, John: Accident and Design

Holyhead, Robert

Horn, Rebecca / Hayden Chisholm: Music for Rebecca Horn's installations

Horn, Rebecca: 10 Werke / 20 Postkarten – 10 Works / 20 Postcards

Huang Rui: Actual Space, Virtual Space

Josephsohn, Hans

Kahrs, Johannes: Down ’n out

Koons, Jeff

Kowski, Uwe: Paintings and Watercolors

La mia ceramica

Larner, Liz

Li Nu: Peace Piece

Mahn, Inge

Marepe

Mikhailov, Boris: Temptation of Life

Mosebach, Martin / Rebecca Horn: Das Lamm (The Lamb)

Neto, Ernesto: From Sebastian to Olivia

Niemann, Christoph

Oehlen, Albert: Luckenwalde

Oehlen, Albert: Mirror Paintings

Oehlen, Albert: Spiegelbilder. Mirror Paintings 1982–1990

Oehlen, Albert: Interieurs

Oehlen, Albert: unverständliche braune Bilder

Oehlen, Pendleton, Pope.L, Sillman

Oehlen, Albert | Schnabel, Julian

Phillips, Richard: Early Works on Paper

Prince, Richard: Super Group

Reyle, Anselm: After Forever

Riley, Bridget

Riley, Bridget: Paintings and Related Works 1983–2010

Riley, Bridget: The Stripe Paintings

Riley, Bridget: Paintings 1984–2020

Roth, Dieter & Iannone, Dorothy

Sammlung im Wandel: Die Sammlung Rudolf und Ute Scharpff

True Stories: A Show Related to an Era – The Eighties

Tunga: Laminated Souls

Tursic, Ida & Mille, Wilfried

de Waal, Edmund: Irrkunst

Wang, Jiajia: Elegant, Circular, Timeless

Warren, Rebecca

Wool, Christopher: Westtexaspsychosculpture

Wool, Christopher: Road

Wool, Christopher: Yard

Wool, Christopher: Swamp

Wool, Christopher: Bad Rabbit

Zhang Wei (2017)

Zhang Wei (2019)

Zhang Wei / Wang Luyan: A Conversation with Jia Wei

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Albert Oehlen: unverständliche braune Bilder
Text Christian Malycha


English / German
Hardcover
24 x 28 cm
55 pages as a leporello
26 color illustrations
978-3-947127-33-7
40.00 Euro

 

Leaf through the book

 

The book presents two new series by painter Albert Oehlen: there are the “incomprehensible brown pictures,” in which he takes up elements of his earlier abstract work to combine them in new ways and take up our traditional idea of the painting as an enigmatic object from another time. Alongside these are the Ö-Norm paintings, in which the artist elegantly balances or wrestles with forms on canvases defining the artist’s current aesthetic standard between painting and collage. These twenty works from the years 2020–2021 were shown in a double exhibition at two venues of Galerie Max Hetzler in Berlin. They are presented here in a bibliophile leporello edition, once as a sequence of work illustrations and, on the opposite, in installation views that invite the reader to walk through the exhibition spaces.

 

Incomprehensible Brown Pictures
(excerpt from the text by Christian Malycha)

Incomprehensible? Like a language you don’t understand. A statement that does not explain itself. Images that cannot be grasped, that cannot be classified. So, what to do? Where to start? “When you paint, you have a physical relationship to the picture through the length of your arm, of your brush. That’s the maximum distance. That’s how much you see of the painting. If the painting has a certain size, you have to make this and that movement, as required factors.” Decoding, up close and personal. Oehlen compresses and stretches, tugs and tears at everything available as visual material. He scatters the colors, sprays and smears them, washes them down. The contrasts are jolting with a bounce. Surfaces dissolve into glazes and drippings or congeal in jagged blocks of paint. Images with towering central streaks alternate with ones piled up from below and others tumbling down from above or encircling a fathomless empty center.


Nothing but opposites: broken centrality, focused dispersion. Signs become textures. Dense passages stand against a staccato of short strokes. Dynamics become hesitant, statics decisive. Fullness meets sparseness. The chromaticity is luminous in the primary colors and warped in the intermediate hues. Geometry counters gestural outbursts. Shapeless lines occasionally take the form of letters (an “OA” or “A”) or expand into enormous landscapes. Abruptly, ornamental webs turn into sprawling fleshy organs. The question of what is ‘authentic’ and what is calculated hangs in the very same limbo as do seriousness and irony. The planes blur into one another but it is precisely this blurring that Oehlen brings into clear focus. When such uncertainty becomes fundamental, its painterly reflection is absolutely contemporary. “For me that’s stimulating, because most abstract painting is rather one-dimensional, very simple in its disposition. So, how can you complicate things to learn something from them?”