Albert Oehlen was born in Krefeld, Germany, in 1954, and has since become one of the most controversial contemporary painters. Oehlen followed his part-time graphic designer father and his brother Markus into the art realm. He studied in Hamburg under Polk, working as a waiter and decorator until he rose to fame in the art worlds of Berlin and Cologne during the Junge Wilde or neo-expressionist movement. He and fellow artists such as Martin Kippenberger and Werner Büttner sought to challenge the status quo of abstract art and push the boundaries of what could be categorized as “painting”. They painted bold, neon, figurative canvasses and juxtaposed figures and narrative with abstraction.Oehlen himself deconstructed painting into color, gesture, motion, and time. He has pushed the limits of art by constraining his process under various parameters, such as layering and contrast of colors. He parodies and imitates the current traditional forms, refusing to cater to any traditional sense of taste or beauty. More recently, he has integrated the language of modern technology such as inkjet printers and computer design programs. He is known for embracing awkwardness and intentional amateurism, allowing crude or ugly elements into his pieces. He perpetually seeks to unsettle his viewers and push further into the infinite variety of forms that painting allows. He says of his art, “Qualities that I want to see brought together: delicacy and coarseness, color and vagueness, and, underlying them all, a base note of hysteria”.Oehlen received his first solo show in 1981 at Galerie Max Hetzler in Berlin. Since then, he has been internationally exhibited; in 2013, Vienna held a retrospective of his work, and in 2016 and 2017 the Cleveland Museum of Art exhibited a survey of over three decades of paintings. From 2000 to 2009, he taught painting at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf. In addition, Oehlen plays in the bands Red Krayola and Van Oehlen, and references music throughout his works. Today, he lives and works in Bühlen, Switzerland, with his wife Esther and three children. His works are collected by museums including the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Musée d’Art Moderne et Contemporain in Strasbourg, and the Cleveland Museum of Art. Sources include:Xamou Art, https://www.xamou-art.com/new-wild-neue-wilde-art-movement/Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albert_OehlenGagosian, https://gagosian.com/artists/albert-oehlen/Serpentine Galleries, https://www.serpentinegalleries.org/whats-on/albert-oehlen/