Albert Oehlen, Richard Prince, Rudolf Stingel

About

Galerie Max Hetzler is pleased to present an exhibition of work by Albert Oehlen, Richard Prince and Rudolf Stingel at Bleibtreustraße 45 in Berlin. The dictionary definition of a remix in music is as follows: ‘Remix is a new version of a piece of music which has been created by putting together the individual instrumental and vocal parts in a different way.' 1 The works in this exhibition all refer recognisably and decidedly to art from the 20th century but differ widely in their intellectual attitudes, variety of techniques, and diverse perspectives which the artists take in riffing off their inspirations. Albert Oehlen’s admiration for the Kyiv-born American artist John Graham reaches back to the 1990s. Executed nearly four decades later, in 2019, the two large-scale works on view in this exhibition are rendered in charcoal on canvas in different tonalities of grey. Presenting a cartoon-like figure juxtaposed against a vast white ground, the compositions interpret and transform Graham’s painting Tramonto Spaventoso (Terrifying Sunset), 1940–1949. Throughout his career, Richard Prince has included elements of American popular culture, as well as the icons of modern art history. The artist has described his method as ‘sampling'. Prince makes speculations by setting up complex relationships and creating short-circuits between both image and word. In the two paintings presented in this exhibition, Prince draws on art history by engaging with the work of Pablo Picasso. Rudolf Stingel takes inspiration from his countryman Ludwig Bemelmans – who, like him, was born in Merano, South Tyrol – and the famous murals which he created for the Carlyle Hotel in New York in 1947. Diverging from their original palette, Stingel’s largely black and white paintings offer photorealistic depictions of individual scenes drawn from Bemelmans’ nostalgic, warmly lit images.