Published by Kerber. Edited by Bärbel Grässlin, Christof Kerber, Christian Malycha. Text by Matthew Bowman, Elisabeth Bushart, Erich Gantzert-Castrillo, Bärbel Grässlin, Gregor Jansen, Christof Kerber, Christian Malycha, Markus Oehlen, Niels Olsen.
German painter Markus Oehlen (born 1956) has remained staunchly outside of the artistic establishment since the beginning of his career in the late 1970s, when he aligned himself with the Neue Wilde—sometimes called Junge Wilde—movement in opposition to minimalism. His early work was instinct-driven, gestural and decidedly anarchic in composition; while his later work is slightly more restrained, the artist continues to eschew traditional narrative interpretation with amorphous shapes, references to pop culture and a consistently eye-catching color palette. This publication focuses on a selection of Oehlen’s work from the past decade, during which he further honed his style into a consistently kaleidoscopic collage of digital and traditional elements. Evoking op-art tendencies while still remaining definitively outside of traditional genre categorization, Oehlen’s most recent pieces use layers of neon to create highly textured, mind-bending patterns.
Published by Walther König, Köln. Text by Harald Falckenberg, Martin Prinzhorn, Wolfgang Ullrich.
German painter Markus Oehlen has created an eclectic body of mixed media paintings that sample imagery from pop culture and punk while remaining true to his anti-establishment roots in the raucous 1980s Berlin art scene, which included colleagues Martin Kippenberger, Werner Büttner and Georg Herold. This publication features work from 1981 to the present.
Markus Oehlen: 1981-2008