Albert Oehlen. Cows by the water

Albert Oehlen has established himself as one of the leading figures in contemporary painting thanks to a continually evolving practice that focuses more on overcoming formal limitations and on experimentation than on the subject of the work. Music has played a central part in the artist’s output, serving as a metaphor for his method of working in which fusion and rhythm, improvisation and repetition, and density and harmony of sounds are turned into pictorial gestures. This monograph maps out a route through the whole of Albert Oehlen’s production, from his best-known works to less familiar ones and from the 1980s to the present day, with reproductions of paintings in the Pinault Collection and other major private collections and international museums.