ALBERT OEHLEN, ADAM PENDLETON

Oehlen, Pendleton, Pope.L, Sillman (publication)
Published by Galerie Max Hetzler Berlin | Paris | London / Holzwarth Publications, 2023

Photo: def image
Photo: def image

The new catalogue published on the occasion of the group exhibition Oehlen, Pendleton, Pope.L, Sillman, on view at Galerie Max Hetzler, Berlin from 4 November 2021 until 29 January 2022, is now available for purchase. Alongside installation views and high-resolution images, the publication includes a conversation between Amy Sillman, Adam Pendleton, and Isabelle Graw.

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Photo: def image
Photo: def image

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ADAM PENDLETON et al.

The Culture. Hip Hop and Contemporary Art in the 21st Century (group show)
Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt
26 February – 26 May 2024

Installation view: The Culture. Hip Hop and Contemporary Art in the 21st Century, © Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt 2024, photo: Emily Piwowar / NÓI
Installation view: The Culture. Hip Hop and Contemporary Art in the 21st Century, © Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt 2024, photo: Emily Piwowar / NÓI

Work by Adam Pendleton is on view in a group show dedicated to the 50th anniver­sary of the birth of Hip Hop. Featuring over 100 paintings, photographs, sculptures and videos, the interdisciplinary exhibition examines Hip Hop’s profound influence on contemporary art and the current cultural landscape.

Schirn Kunsthalle

Installation view: The Culture. Hip Hop and Contemporary Art in the 21st Century, © Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt 2024, photo: Emily Piwowar / NÓI
Installation view: The Culture. Hip Hop and Contemporary Art in the 21st Century, © Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt 2024, photo: Emily Piwowar / NÓI

ADAM PENDLETON et al.

All that Lies Between | Drawing Triennial 2023 (group show)
The Norwegian Drawing Center, Oslo
13 October – 22 December 2023

 Adam Pendleton, Untitled (Who Is Queen), 2021, © Adam Pendleton, photo: Nicolas Brasseur
Adam Pendleton, Untitled (Who Is Queen), 2021, © Adam Pendleton, photo: Nicolas Brasseur

Adam Pendleton’s Untitled (Who Is Queen), 2021, will be included in the tenth edition of the Drawing Triennial. Presented at the Norwegian Drawing Center, Oslo, All that Lies Between aims to examine the relationship between the written and the drawn, the said and the unsaid, and everything in between. 

The Norwegian Drawing Center

 Adam Pendleton, Untitled (Who Is Queen), 2021, © Adam Pendleton, photo: Nicolas Brasseur
Adam Pendleton, Untitled (Who Is Queen), 2021, © Adam Pendleton, photo: Nicolas Brasseur

ALBERT OEHLEN

Albert Oehlen (solo show)
Friedrichs Foundation, Weidingen
27 August – 17 December 2023

Installation view: Albert Oehlen, Friedrichs Foundation, Weidingen, 2023, photo: Günzel | Rademacher
Installation view: Albert Oehlen, Friedrichs Foundation, Weidingen, 2023, photo: Günzel | Rademacher

When Albert Oehlen set out as a painter in the late 1970s, it was a time out of joint. Given German history, terrorism, 'No Future,' and Nineteen-Eighty-Four as well as the permanent threat of all-out nuclear war, painting could not pretend that the world was safe and sound. As the world shattered, so did painting. As all symbols, signs, and means were damaged and devoid of meaning, he unmasked painting in all its dubiousness. How is one to tell authentic gesture from blunt reproduction, genuine emotion from a disillusioned readymade copy? Oehlen accepts the shattering and transforms it into the basis of his painting. He invents an overtly fragmented image, which is as disoriented as the reality, in which it partakes. Traces, stimuli, and after-images of reality flash stroboscopically across his canvases. It is through this attitude that he has achieved an exceptional degree of painterly liberty, With each new image, he updates and renews the possibilities and impossibilities of painting, thereby granting an appropriate form to a diffuse reality. 

For the first time, Albert Oehlen has created an expansive all-over installation, spanning the entirety of the Friedrichs Foundation’s exhibition hall, into which 12 paintings have been playfully integrated.

Friedrichs Foundation

Installation view: Albert Oehlen, Friedrichs Foundation, Weidingen, 2023, photo: Günzel | Rademacher
Installation view: Albert Oehlen, Friedrichs Foundation, Weidingen, 2023, photo: Günzel | Rademacher

ALBERT OEHLEN

Ömega Man, 2023 (outdoor sculpture) 
Stiftung zur Förderung Zeitgenössischer Kunst in Weidingen / Rodenhof
On view from 15 July 2023

Albert Oehlen, Ömega Man, 2023, photo: def image
Albert Oehlen, Ömega Man, 2023, photo: def image

Albert Oehlen’s monumental sculpture Ömega Man, 2023, is now on view to the public in Weidingen, where it emerges from the vast landscape of the Südeifel. Its simplified form and slightly raised steel bars, recessed into their concrete casting, evoke the lightness of a drawing. Here, the persistent importance of the line in Oehlen’s work becomes evident, appearing simultaneously curved and controlled. In this work, the artist uses elements which are both abstract and figurative to critically examine the history and conventions of contemporary art, all the while continuing to acknowledge the importance of classical models. Massive yet fragile in its isolation, Oehlen's Ömega Man appears like a monument from the future. Omega, the last letter of the Greek alphabet, is here written with an umlaut, thereby referring to the artist’s own name. 

Stiftung zur Förderung Zeitgenössischer Kunst in Weidingen

Albert Oehlen, Ömega Man, 2023, photo: def image
Albert Oehlen, Ömega Man, 2023, photo: def image

ADAM PENDLETON

Who Is Queen? Vols. 1–5 (publication)
Published by DABA, New York
October 2022

Image: © Hopscotch Reading Room, Berlin
Image: © Hopscotch Reading Room, Berlin

Published on the occasion of the artist’s solo show Adam Pendleton: Who Is Queen? at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, 2021–2022, the 5 volume book series Who Is Queen? adapts conversations between pairs of notable writers, theorists, philosophers, and musicians into contrapuntal texts. Transcripts of the original dialogues are intertwined with archival photographs and external texts.

DABA Press

Image: © Hopscotch Reading Room, Berlin
Image: © Hopscotch Reading Room, Berlin

ALBERT OEHLEN

The Painter, a film by Albert Oehlen, Oliver Hirschbiegel and Ben Becker

© 2020 by Albert Oehlen, Oliver Hirschbiegel and Ben Becker
© 2020 by Albert Oehlen, Oliver Hirschbiegel and Ben Becker

Under the direction of Oliver Hirschbiegel, actor Ben Becker on screen impersonates the contemporary painter Albert Oehlen and re-creates a painting that Oehlen himself and in parallel is creating step by step in the background, with the actor improvising the process in front of the camera. The finished on-screen painting is an original “Oehlen” on which the artist himself never laid hands. The off screen blueprint painting was destroyed after principal shooting had finished.

Originally planned to be a performative statement the projects developed into a fully fledged feature film of 92 minutes, crossing formal boundaries and questioning the meaning of the creative process and the struggle for authenticity on various levels.

The Painter follows the artist / actor as he is struggling and suffering along this process with us watching in joyful despair and what might happen next until the white canvas has turned into a finished painting.

The outcome is a one-man rollercoaster that appears to be a documentary but in fact is a staged and guided improvisation with the “real” process happening behind the camera. The Painter is a constant flow of the artist’s journey with elements of farce and comedy topped with emotional moments of truth...in front of and behind the camera and leaving it up to us to decide what is real and/or authentic.

Watch the trailer here.


Picture Tree International

© 2020 by Albert Oehlen, Oliver Hirschbiegel and Ben Becker
© 2020 by Albert Oehlen, Oliver Hirschbiegel and Ben Becker

ADAM PENDLETON

Pasts, Futures, and Aftermaths: Revisiting the Black Dada Reader (publication)

In 2011, artist Adam Pendleton assembled Black Dada Reader, a compendium of texts, documents and positions that elucidated a practice and ethos of “Black Dada.” Resembling a school course reader, the book was a spiral-bound series of photocopies and collages, originally intended only for personal reference, and eventually distributed informally to friends and colleagues. The contents—an unlikely mix of Hugo Ball, W.E.B. Du Bois, Adrian Piper, Gertrude Stein, Sun Ra, Stokely Carmichael, Gilles Deleuze—formed a kind of experimental canon, realized through what Pendleton calls “radical juxtaposition.” In 2017, Koenig Books published the Reader in a hardcover edition, with newly commissioned essays and additional writings by the artist.

A decade later, Pendleton has composed another reader, building upon the constellation of writers, artists, filmmakers, philosophers and critics that emerged in the first volume, and sketching out new potential forms and vectors for Black Dada. Along with new source texts—from Toni Cade Bambara to Piet Mondrian to Clarice Lispector to Achille Mbembe—Pendleton has included conversations with some of the figures whose writing and work were featured in the earlier Reader: Thomas Hirschhorn, Ishmael Houston-Jones, Joan Jonas, Lorraine O’Grady, and Joan Retallack.

Get your copy here.