Albert Oehlen

Copyright: Albert Oehlen
Courtesy: Albert Oehlen
Provenance: Donated by the artist

German artist Albert Oehlen (b. 1954) studied under Sigmar Polke at the Hochschule für Bildende Künste in Hamburg. He and his neo- expressionist artist colleagues, who made it their task to deconstruct existing norms of art, rose
to international prominence in the 1980s as the “Junge Wilde”.

Oehlen’s painting process actively integrates visual interferences, exaggerations and banalisations. After his works became increasingly non-representational, he distanced himself from the attributions of “abstract” and “figurative” in order to break down binary ways of thinking. He ironically described his painting as “post-non-representational”.

This work on paper contains many components for which Oehlen is well-known. He combines painting with different media and thereby probes the categorisations of art here with collage. The two media seem inseparable, yet at the same time cause a moment of confusion. Oehlen works here with the dissolution of supposed opposites, as his gestural brushwork allows horse and rider to become one with abstract geometric forms. The humorous title (“Salvador Dalí teaches his horse to do sums”) refers to Dalí’s illustrations to “Don Quixote” and creates a meta level—typical of Oehlen—that influences the way the work is read.