Assistant Exhibitions Curator Joseph Constable leads a tour of the Albert Oehlen exhibition. BSL interpretation is available on request for all our Saturday Talks.
Albert Oehlen (b. 1954, Krefeld, Germany) is one of the most innovative and significant artists working today. He has been a key figure in contemporary art since the 1980s and the diversity of his painting is a testament to the intrinsic freedom that remains at the heart of the medium. Through expressionist brushwork, surrealist gestures and deliberate amateurism, he engages with the history of painting, pushing its essential components to bold new extremes.
At the centre of the Serpentine Gallery will be an installation that marks the beginning of Oehlen’s process of interpreting the Rothko Chapel in Houston, Texas. Four new paintings – the same scale and size as the four horizontal canvases found in the Chapel – have been made specifically for this exhibition. Alongside this central installation will be a selection of paintings from the last two decades. A newly-configured soundtrack, will play at intervals through the duration of the exhibition.
