‘I’m not interested in the autonomy of the artist or of his signature style. My concern, my project, is to produce an autonomy of the painting, so that each work no longer needs that legitimising framework.’ –Albert Oehlen



Rich with a latent dynamism and reverberating energy, Das Privileg/M III exemplifies Albert Oehlen’s distinctive audacious approach to art making. Treating the pictorial space with a range of textures, strokes and mediums, Oehlen combines density with translucency, the sinous with the geometric and the recognisable with the abstract. From the vivid and unconventional washes of watercolour, strokes of acrylic and billowing areas of spray paint, the German artist reconsiders the boundaries of painting through his pioneering ‘post-non-representational’ approach.

Studying under Sigmar Polke at the Hochschule für bildende Künste, Hamburg, Albert Oehlen emerged alongside artists like Martin Kippenberger and Georg Herold in the wake of the Tendenzwende, or change of socio-political tendency in the 1970s. Commencing abstract paintings in 1988 after he and Kippenberger infamously secluded themselves in a home in Andalucia for a year, Oehlen over his prodigious career challenged the boundaries of ‘high art’, approaching his practice with an irreverent, punk-like spirit. The subject of major exhibitions in pre-eminent institutions like the Serpentine Gallery, London (2019) and the Palazzo Grassi, Venice (2018), Oehlen’s work is located in significant international collections like the Tate, London and the Museum of Modern Art, New York.