|
Markus Oehlen, Born Again
Radio.com, 2010
Acryl auf Leinwand
200 x 160
cm
Courtesy of Gerhardsen Gerner, Berlin
MARKUS
OEHLEN
Opening:
April 29, 7–9 pm
Exhibition period: April 29 – June
2011
On
the occasion of Gallery Weekend Berlin 2011,
Gerhardsen Gerner has the great pleasure of
announcing its first solo exhibition with Markus
Oehlen.
The
painter, musician and sculptor Markus Oehlen, born in Krefeld
in 1956, belongs to an artistic generation that once spoke in
the Punk style of “No Future.” Now, for the first time in 16
years, Markus Oehlen is showing his work again in Berlin. We
are enormously pleased to be able to present the artist’s
outstanding new paintings.
Oehlen studied at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf between
1976 and 1982, during which time he was also a drummer in the
band Charley’s Girls and its successor Fehlfarben und
Mittagspause. He was co-founder of the legendary “Ratinger
Hof” in Düsseldorf, the city in which he worked during the
wild 1980s as one of the leading representatives of the
so-called “Neue Wilde”, alongside artists like Martin
Kippenberger, Werner Büttner or Walter Dahn (Cologne). The
art, fashion, music, literature, film and theatre of this
generation became linked in a comprehensive crossover—the
artists adapted to one another’s respective domains, motifs,
methods, and codes and thus created new hybrid forms, the
polar patterns of thought acting as foils to one another.
Since 2002, Oehlen has been a professor at the Academy of Fine
Arts, Munich.
Markus Oehlen’s paintings are multi-layered, complex
entities whose forms seem to push underwater bubbles to the
surface. With their many overlapping layers, Oehlen’s works
appear to be cartographies drawn from memory. One could also
speculate that they (and they alone) are capable of laying
bare previously concealed phenomena and dimensions of the
world. In the planes that make up his paintings, Oehlen
re-mixes found images, compressing them and forging new
ones.
The
artist dissolves specific layers into a mist, producing a kind
of digital effect. This is reinforced on a compositional level
by patterned striations, a continuous renewal of defined forms
through stacked colours (much like the effect of an infrared
recording) and pixel-like elements. Yet, this digitalized
effect is produced with entirely conventional techniques, such
as silkscreen, photocopying, or linoleum printing. Markus
Oehlen has been experimenting with these modes of
reproduction, integrating them in collage-like ways into his
works, since 1995—around the same time that computer
technology was developing the first solutions for creating a
spatial effect within a digital image.
In
their complex structuring and digital references, Markus
Oehlen’s paintings have the effect of an image interference.
In them, reality seems to solidify as a flickering
simulacrum.
Markus Oehlen´s work has been featured
in numerous exhibitions, including a solo exhibition at the
Kunsthalle Gießen and the group exhibition “Die Bilder tun was
mit mir...” at the Museum Frieder Burda, Baden-Baden (both in
2010); at the Centro Cultural Andratx (2008-2009); at ZKM in
Karlsruhe (2008); at the Ursula Blickle Foundation and at the
Kunstverein Frankfurt (both in 2007); at the Haus der Kunst in
Münich (2005); and at the Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlin
(2003).
GERHARDSEN GERNER
Holzmarktstr.
15-18
S-Bahnbogen 46
10179 Berlin-Mitte
Germany
T:
+49 30 695 183 41
|
