Albert Oehlen's exhibition at Luhring Augustine explores painting as political critique through advertising posters

Albert Oehlen's current show at Luhring Augustine features paintings using Spanish advertisement posters as grounds, partially covering commercial imagery to critique advertising's seductiveness. In works like Mujer (2008), a large oil-and-paper on canvas, expressionist strokes in red, green, brown, and mauve disfigure a headless, armless, legless female figure with the word 'Mujer' beneath, where the poster acts as a foil for destructive intervention. Ice (2008) employs an upside-down Ben and Jerry's ice cream ad as its center, with formal script letters across it and broad yellow stripes beneath, aiming to obscure consumerist visuals. Sin (2008) incorporates a sign with the letters 'Sin' and a poster for a musical tour covered by tan and blue paint smudges, allowing ambiguous readings. Oehlen, a midcareer painter from Germany, has long focused on failure, as seen in his 1986 portrait of Hitler, which he intended to fail from a propaganda perspective. He escapes formalism by concentrating on content and political attitudes, using materials read for bias rather than formal properties. The paintings, often sumptuous, engage with postmodern critiques of painting's intentions, with intellectual implications of high order. The exhibition highlights Oehlen's role as a theorist of art's content, experimenting with painting as a vehicle for political statements.