Albert Oehlen

I’ve always been looking for trouble. 
—Albert Oehlen.

Gagosian is pleased to present an exhibition of new paintings by Albert Oehlen. For his first show at the gallery in London since 2016, Oehlen continues to explore the rich possibilities and the future of painting. He riffs on fragments, forms, and entire motifs of his imagination in a manner that echoes both the sampling of a musical composition and the mechanisms of cinematography. These references are the vehicles for vivid painterly invention.

Oehlen’s images are divided, repeated, and distorted to conjure a new pictorial narrative. His original source is reimagined; it is at times decipherable, and at others annihilated. The subject of these paintings is, arguably, unimportant; it is the act of transferring images into a new state that is now significant. The result is sometimes a regular, repeated composition that follows from one section to the next. Yet in other paintings, he chooses much more irregular twists and turns, filled with different possible shapes and endings. There is no barrier between abstraction and figuration, improvisation and control, only the endless potential of the medium.