LONDON.- For Frieze London 2026, Gagosian is presenting six major new, large-scale paintings by Albert Oehlen. In these works, Oehlen continues to explore the still-rich possibilities of a long-established medium and format, riffing on varied fragments, forms, and motifs.
Throughout his oeuvre, Oehlen reimagines diverse sources in ways that render “subject matter” less significant than the act of transforming images into new states. Combining graphic brushstrokes and painterly drips with unexpected chromatic and textural juxtapositions, he tests the limits of coherence. Oehlen blends figuration with abstraction, often employing various modes of painting within the same composition in a further disruption of modernist convention. A champion of self-consciously amateurish “bad” painting, he infuses his work with mischievous, destabilizing attitude.
The paintings on view in London incorporate abstractions of the image of a man with an extravagant mustache—an art historical reference that Oehlen has made repeatedly—but they are also immersed in the present. They are filled with twists and turns, and with myriad different shapes and endings that resist conceptual resolution. “I’m not interested in meaning at all,” Oehlen has declared. “I especially can’t stand it if it’s like encoding and decoding.”
What the new works hinge on primarily is the active use of color, which makes itself felt in lines and shapes, layers and interjections, in ways that seem to emit light and even sound. These marks and passages overlap with and permeate one another, appearing to move around and even through the canvas. Each painting contains numerous elements, none of which are static or complete, but which rely on what Oehlen has dubbed “maximum chance” to exercise their dynamic effect. As critic John Kelsey has observed, Oehlen conjures “ways of basing painterly decisions on a sort of self-imposed cancellation or disturbance of his own powers.” He is a virtuoso who demonstrates the fact by obscuring or erasing his own performance, turning the responsibility—and pleasure—of identifying and inhabiting it over to us.
