Albert Oehlen's 80+ Paintings Fill Palazzo Grassi in Venice

Following Damien Hirst's blockbuster exhibition last year, Palazzo Grassi and Punta della Dogana in Venice present a new double show. At Punta della Dogana, works from the Pinault Collection dialogue with loans from the Museum Folkwang in Essen. At Palazzo Grassi, over 80 paintings by German artist Albert Oehlen (born 1954 in Krefeld) trace his creative journey from the 1980s to the present. Curated by Caroline Bourgeois, the exhibition explores Oehlen's interplay of figuration, geometry, and abstraction, influenced by Surrealism and Sigmar Polke. His method involves layering letters, faces, animal heads, and floral motifs under cascades of color, often obscuring but never fully erasing the figurative elements. The series H.A.T. I-VI recalls Tillmans's photographic aesthetic, while other works evoke Pop art with deliberate dissonance. Oehlen's approach embraces compositional shifts and conscious disorder as tools for painterly freedom within historical limits.