Albert Oehlen's Non-Retrospective at Carré d'Art Nîmes

Albert Oehlen's exhibition at Carré d'Art – Musée d'art contemporain in Nîmes, running from June 24 to October 9, is not a retrospective but gathers around forty works from the early 1990s to the present. The show highlights distinct series: the Grey Paintings, Computer Paintings, and Finger Paintings. The Grey Paintings emerged from a reflection on Gerhard Richter's blurred works and a shortage of Oehlen's favorite colors, leading him to mix remaining tubes to create grey. Oehlen treats painting as a formal game, blending abstraction and figuration without direct quotation. He considers himself an abstract painter; any figurative elements, like collaged photographs, serve purely formal purposes. For instance, FM26 (2008) features a photograph of a diving board and hints of an older swimmer in a cap, partially overlaid with finger-painted strokes, while the other half remains bare, with black, red, and yellow bands at the bottom evoking the German flag. The exhibition thus encompasses three categories of abstract painting: lyrical abstraction, monochrome, and geometric abstraction.