Albert Oehlen

Born in 1954^[1] in Krefeld, Oehlen studied in Hamburg until 1981. In the same year as his enrolment, he co-founded with Werner Buttner the Liga zur Bekampfung des widersprulichen Verhaltens (League to Combat Contradictory Behaviour): an absurdist institutional gesture that set the tone for his career. Early figurative works such as Fence (1982) are thematically provocative, painted with rapid but controlled brushwork.

The Mirror Images series, begun in 1984, embedded actual mirror fragments into canvas surfaces. The conceptual argument was clear: the literal reflection of the surrounding room inverted Abstract Expressionism's invitation for the viewer to enter the picture. By that year he was exhibiting alongside Buttner, Georg Herold, and Martin Kippenberger at 'Wahrheit ist Arbeit' (Truth is Work) at the Folkwang Museum in Essen.

His abstract work pushed further into destabilised surfaces, using commercially printed fabric as a ground layer. In the Untitled triptych of 1983, the fabric's pattern and the applied paint contest each other across the canvas plane. Computer-generated imagery entered his practice from the early 1990s, and a retrospective followed at the Deichtorhallen Hamburg in 1994. Art historians place him not with the emotionally earnest Neo-Expressionists but with the Dadaistically inclined strand of his generation: the strand that treated painting itself as a proposition to be examined. He lives in La Palma, Spain.