Albert Oehlen’s personal exhibition at Palazzo Grassi is part of a cycle of monographic shows dedicated to contemporary artists - inaugurated in 2012 with Urs Fischer, and followed up with Rudolf Stingel, Irving Penn, Martial Raysse and Sigmar Polke – presented alternately with thematic shows of works from the Pinault Collection.

Curated by Caroline Bougeois, the exhibition lays out a path dedicated to Albert Oehlen’s production through a selection of approximately 85 works, including some lesser-known ones, created between the 1980s and today. The works brought together come from the Pinault Collection as well as from other major private collections and international museums.

The unique exhibition path is not chronological but rather suggests a syncopated rhythm between various genres and periods, thereby underlining the central role played by music in the artist’s practice. Music emerges as a real metaphor of his work method, where contamination and rhythm, improvisation and repetition, density and harmony of sounds become pictorial gestures.

Albert Oehlen (1954, Krefeld, Germany) reveals himself to be a major figure of contemporary painting thanks to his artistic research in constant evolution, dedicated to experiments and to overcoming formal limits rather than to the subject represented.

The artist’s work has already be presented in exhibitions around the world, including at the Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes in Havana in 2017, the Cleveland Museum of Art in 2016, the New Museum in New York in 2015, the Kunstmuseum in Bonn in 2012 and the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris in 2009. The show in Venice is his largest monographic one to date.