Gagosian Gallery, Paris, is presenting Endless Summer, an exhibition of new paintings by Albert Oehlen.. The paintings explore the theme of the bather, a motif deeply embedded in French art history that captivated such artists as Pierre Bonnard, Paul Cézanne, Édouard Manet, and Pablo Picasso.

The bather has maintained a significant and diverse presence throughout the history of art, and in Endless Summer, Oehlen contributes to the tradition in characteristically expressive style. Presenting variations on a dark-haired female nude, he sometimes approaches, sometimes retreats from his ostensible subject, using it as a template for unbounded experimentation. While the woman’s shape is clearly legible in some paintings, in others it dissolves into pure gesture, shifting Oehlen’s project continually between representation and abstraction.

Neither figurative nor abstract, the work of German painter Alber Oehlen  champions the failures of painting – brash juxtapositions of color, discordant symbolic references, and an altogether unconventional approach argues the potential of achieving beauty in breaking the fundamental rules of art.

For Albert Oehlen, abstract painting does not exclude figuration, but utilizes it through transformation – reshaping reality into a two-dimensional picture plane. Traditional hierarchy is disrupted; and with no attempt to create meaning, Oehlen’s paintings are on the subject of painting itself.

Techniques abound, from heavy dripping, spraying and smearing to delicate washes of rag-blur or sfumato – the artist demonstrates his unrestrained approach to painting. Caught between flatness and depth, structure and formlessness, the works contrast areas of painterly intricacy with expressive sabotage, revealing an inimitable range of paint handling techniques, unique to the artist.

Oehlen produced his first abstract paintings in the late 1980s, with iconoclastic intent, in the hope of denouncing the inadequacy of painting; by the early 1990s, his paintings were incorporating ambiguous shapes and flashes of colour, that have since become a hallmark of his oeuvre.

The artist has also repeatedly produced bodies of work that utilise the methods and aesthetics of collage, by combining such materials as advertising posters or printed fabric, with transparent veils of overpainting. Some of these paintings incorporate old exhibition posters, cut-out images and fragments of text, evoking Oehlen’s earlier ‘Billboard Paintings’, whilst also continuing to ridicule the abstract/figurative dualism.

In this way, the new works remix motifs and techniques from the artist’s iconoclastic practice, whilst also pushing in new directions with surface, colour and line, cementing Oehlen’s reputation for subverting the conventions of the medium. Here, painting is presented as an area of heterogeneity and tension, in which the possibilities and value of self-expression, artistic authenticity, and even, the act of painting itself, undergo relentless re-assessment.

ALBERT OEHLEN
ENDLESS SUMMER
GAGOSIAN GALLERY
PARIS, FRANCE
20 Oct through 20 Dec 2025
www.gagosian.com

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