mumok presents Albert Oehlen Malerei on view from June 8 to October 20, 2013, the first comprehensive overview in Austria of Oehlen’s work from the early 1980s to the present, including key works from all phases of the artist’s career. With more than 80 paintings, collages, computer prints, drawings, and an installation from 2005, this is the hitherto largest presentation of Oehlen’s highly diverse oeuvre. “This is the first opportunity to see such a large range of Oehlen’s work in one place,” says director Karola Kraus. The exhibition design compares and contrasts different groups of works, which are involved in a permanent “dispute of ideas” (Albert Oehlen). These various groups will transfer energy to and from, commenting on and questioning each other. The exhibition will also show for the first specially painted cycle, in which Oehlen programmatically refers collage techniques and actionist finger painting to each other.
Albert Oehlen (born 1954 in Krefeld) is not only one of the most influential, but also one of the most controversial of contemporary painters. His project of bringing painting up to date consists not least in positioning this good old medium against its critics and often naive supporters alike. He aims to bring painting into conflict on several fronts at the same time—with its own history, with its clichés and its missed opportunities, and with the ubiquitous power of the pictorial languages of advertising and pop. Oehlen wishes to restore freshness and complexity to a medium that has been declared defunct, not by dodging all the attacks and polemic to which tradition is subjected, but by making the picture itself the locus of lively debate on these issues.
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