ALBERT OEHLEN, with text by John Kelsey and a conversation between Oehlen and Christopher Wool

Gagosian, 2012, First edition, 64 pp., 11 1/4" X 11 1/4", Hardcover

Fine

Published on the occasion of Albert Oehlen at Gagosian, New York, the artist’s first exhibition with the gallery. Oehlen’s large-scale paintings combine flat, figurative cutouts with gestural strokes of oil paint, tugging at the distinctions between human-made and machine-made, representational and nonrepresentational, abstract and figurative. In some works, the open-ended, “unfinished” dialogue between binary oppositions is unsettling yet compelling; in any one work, the paint, the collaged pictures and texts, and patches of white canvas occupy their own spaces, like clutter on a worktable. The publication features a new text by John Kelsey and a conversation between Oehlen and Christopher Wool.