About the Exhibit - Fn Paintings
I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, Skarstedt’s 64th street location is the most beautiful gallery in New York City, and therefore the perfect setting for Albert Oehlen’s fall exhibit.
It’s been quite the year for Albert Oehlen, between this show at Skarstedt gallery and his exhibit at the Serpentine Gallery in London.
For this exhibit, Fn Paintings, on view at Skarstedt Gallery’s 64th street location from September 12 – November 2, 2019, Albert Oehlen presents 21 paintings, the largest collection of his works at any given time since 1991.
“The title meaning ‘footnote’, suggests an annotation to the legacy of traditional painting, allowing for a multitude of alternatives to arise in the contemporary moment.” (source)
“Neither figurative nor abstract, the series champions the failures of painting – brash juxtapositions of color, discordant symbolic references, and an altogether unconventional approach argues the potential of achieving beauty in breaking the fundamental rules of art.” (source)
If you’re at all familiar with Albert Oehlen’s work, it didn’t always look like this. In 1989 Oehlen made a shift toward non-figurative painting and honestly started creating his best work yet. It’s really exciting to see an artist that only becomes better with age (like George Condo). He now walks a fine line between figuration and abstraction.
“I am convinced that I cannot achieve beauty via a direct route; that can only be the result of deliberation… That’s the interesting thing about art: that somehow, you use your material to make something that results in something beautiful, via a path that no one has yet trodden. That means working with something, where your predecessors would have said, ‘You can’t do that.’ First, you take a step toward ugliness and then, somehow or other, you wind up where it’s beautiful”- Albert Oehlen (source)
About the Artist - Albert Oehlen
Albert Oehlen was born in German in 1954.
He attended the University of Fine Arts in Hamburg and moved to Berlin in 1977. According to his Wikipedia, Oehlen was a member of the ‘bad boy’ Berlin group which included fellow artists Martin Kippenberger and Georg Herold.
In classic Berlin style, Oehlen is super into music, running an independent label - Leiterwagen, which put out experimental electronic music.
Oehlen lives and works in Switzerland.
