Albert Oehlen: New Paintings

This book was published on the occasion of Albert Oehlen: New Paintings at Gagosian, Grosvenor Hill, London. The exhibition featured a set of dynamic compositions in which Oehlen continues to riff on a range of visual fragments, forms, and motifs, echoing the mechanisms of cinematography and the process of sampling in music. As he divides, distorts, and reimagines his images and marks, the artist erodes barriers between abstraction and figuration, improvisation and control, to discover new pictorial narratives. Combining graphic brushstrokes, painterly drips, unexpected colors, and contrasting textures, Oehlen tests the limits of both coherence and legibility.

Fully illustrated with color plates, including studio and contextual photographs, the catalogue reproduces all the works in the exhibition together with “Looking for Trouble,” an illustrated essay by curator, writer, and editor Reto Thüring that recounts the genesis and operation of Oehlen’s “productive spirit of resistance” and traces the increasing importance of process in his work.