Albert Oehlen

This volume takes a close look at a recent development in the career of painter Albert Oehlen (born 1954), scrutinizing eleven works from late 2004 to 2005, in which collaged elements first entered the artist's celebrated abstractions. Oehlen has long maneuvered between figuration and abstraction, and here, amid a muddy palette enlivened by streaks of fresh blues and pinks, collaged fragments of landscapes or human faces peer out, sometimes jarring and sometimes blending with the composition. As Anne Pontégnie points out in her essay, these works "combine experiments of the past with a momentum toward future experiment. Here is an energy in which pleasure, humor and elegance rub shoulders with anger, ugliness and brutality." These works are given luxury treatment in this volume, which offers nine of the eleven paintings in superbly printed full-color gatefolds.