"One evening I pulled Beauty down on my knees. I found her embittered and I cursed her." Arthur Rimbaud
Come and see Albert Oehlen paintings curse beauty this summer at the New Museum.
Massive Inkjet posters are pasted on canvas to initiate a complex painting process. The prints form a digital collage of photos, drawings and brushwork and act as a backdrop for a fluid painterly overlay. An argument breaks out between brushwork and inkjet. Angry lines parry with vomity color patches. These paintings don’t breathe. They weeze.
What delicious, vulgar abstractions they are.
Come and see, before they become pretty with time.
Tom McManus
Thomas McManus is a writer, artist and professor at Fashion Institute of Technology in NYC.