ALBERT OEHLEN. SPIEGEL BILDER - MIRROR PAINTING

ALBERT OEHLEN (1954-)

Albert Oehlen’s Mirror Paintings are mirror paintings in the truest sense of the word. They form a significant group of works in which the painter investigated pictorial space and spatial effects during the 1980s. As the artist himself pointed out, mirrors have always been depicted in art. But in his constant search for deeper meaning, Oehlen included real mirrors in these works, thus subverting their iconographical significance. The viewer is invited into the picture only to be thrown back at the same time. Real space in front of the painting becomes collaged with the pictorial space.

Albert Oehlen (Born 1954 in Krefeld) is an internationally recognized protagonist of painting. By continuously questioning the genre, he redefined the panel picture. His “post-non-figurative” painting is a medium of criticism that mischievously turns the classic concept of the image as well as middle-class values upside down.

This is the first book dealing specifically with Albert Oehlen’s Mirror Paintings. Its contents and chronology take up where the publisher's Albert Oehlen: Gemälde Paintings 1980–1982, which is now out of print, left off. Like the other volumes about the art of the 1980s published in cooperation with the Galerie Max Hetzler, it shows that the art production of that time is of undiminished relevance today.