Albert Oehlen Krefeld, Germany, b. 1954

He seamlessly transitions between abstraction and realism, offering a contemporary interpretation of traditional painting models, in which technique and material form an independent artistic language.

From 1978 to 1981, Oehlen studied art at the University of Fine Arts Hamburg under the guidance of Sigmar Polke. During the early stages of his career, his artistic interests encompassed both music and painting, reflecting the prevailing Neo-Expressionist aesthetic of the time. In 1976, together with Werner Büttner, he founded the Liga zur Bekämpfung des widersprüchlichen Verhaltens (League Against Contradictory Behavior), which expressed artistic and political views through anarchic happenings.

Alongside Martin Kippenberger and Werner Büttner, Oehlen became associated with the Junge Wilde (Neue Wilde) movement, which emerged as a counterpoint to minimalism and conceptual art. Influenced by Jörg Immendorff’s “bad painting” and Georg Baselitz’s Neo-Expressionism, Oehlen initially combined abstract and figurative elements in his series Malerei über Malerei (“Painting by Painting”). By the late 1980s, he fully dedicated himself to what he defined as “post-abstract” painting—an exploration and deconstruction of the very nature of abstraction.