In the 1980s, Albert Oehlen (*1954) made his name as a young painter of great resourcefulness who tackled irreverent subject matter with loose brushstrokes and seemingly arbitrary rules to challenge himself. This would include leaving the choice of colors to the special offers section of the paint shop, working only in primary colors, or, in one of his central series starting in 1982, gluing mirrors to the canvas and painting over and around them. Here the mirrors become part of the texture of a depicted room, in sometimes messy, sometimes strangely luminous paintings of apartments, museums, or stage-like spaces enclosed by heavy brick walls. At the same time they invite the viewers into the painting as reflections through layers of yellowish varnish. This conceptually astute and subversively humorous series was shown in two exhibitions at Galerie Max Hetzler in London and Nahmad Contemporary in New York and is explored here in an essay by Raphael Rubinstein, who reflects on both the representational ramifications and art-historical relationships of the mirror paintings.weiterlesen