Markus Oehlen Painting

Each painting unfolds according to its own internal logic, shifting between abstraction and figuration, order and disruption, precision and spontaneity. By using image-based sampling, familiar forms appear only to dissolve again, while fragments of art history, popular culture, graphic design, and everyday visual culture collide in layered compositions. A key feature of Oehlen’s most recent paintings is the incorporation of manipulated photographs combined with pixel-like grids.

Markus Oehlen belongs to the generation of German artists known as the Junge Wilde, who in the early 1980’s rejected minimalism and conceptual art, and instead embraced vivid colour, gestural brushwork and unconventional materials and processes, including wax, batik and inexpensive emulsion paint. Many of his early strategies continue to resonate in his work today such as the repeated clusters of lines and the flickering network-like structures that often extend across the entire surface of the painting.

What initially appears chaotic gradually reveals an underlying rhythm. The works invite viewers to navigate a stream of references without offering a stable point of orientation. The works presented in Painting demonstrate an artist whose curiosity remains undiminished, reaffirming painting not as a fixed tradition but as an open and restless medium that engages with its position within the culture of present-day.

Markus Oehlen (b. 1956, Krefeld, Germany) lives and works in Munich, Germany, where he has been a professor at the Academy of Fine Arts from 2002-2023. He has works in the permanent collection of the MoMA – Museum of Modern Art in New York, Saint Louis Art Museum, Sammlung Zeitgenössischer Kunst der Bundesrepublik Deutschland, Kunsthalle Weishaupt and others. Selected shows include exhibitions at MoMA – Museum of Modern Art, New York; a duo exhibition with Albert Oehlen at the Museum Abteiburg, Germany; Hamburger Bahnhof Museum für Gegenwart, Germany; Museum Ludwig, Germany; and at the ZKM Center for for Arts and Media Karlsruhe, Germany.