HÜRTH.- On October 18th, gallerist Rafael Jablonka opened at Böhm Chapel the latest exhibition by German painter Albert Oehlen (*1954), in collaboration with German musician Wolfgang Voigt (*1961).

As part of the “Junge Wilde” (young savages) painting movement in Germany during the 1980s, Albert Oehlen produced his first tree paintings. These bore thickly applied streaks of color in muted brown tones, standing isolated in the color space, and floating between abstraction and figuration, surface and space. During the 1990s, a new generation of the tree motif appeared in his work. This time, oil paints were applied to computer-generated images transferred onto aluminum panels, with traces of the digital lines left partially revealed.

In the early 2000s, works such as DJ Techno (2001) and Situation (2003) heralded a new phase in Oehlen’s oeuvre. Traditional still lifes, nudes, and abstractions gained three-dimensional qualities with the help of digital and multimedia collage techniques.

With the exhibition BAUM 3, which has been created in collaboration with renowned electronic music composer Wolfgang Voigt, Oehlen inaugurated a new on-site work. In the middle of Böhm Chapel, a live tree has been installed behind a large projection screen. An elaborately programmed light installation, together with Voigt’s driving techno bass drum, transform the static object into a pulsating, futuristic figure.

Albert Oehlen was born in Krefeld and is recognized as one of Germany’s key contemporary multimedia artists. He studied at the University of Visual Arts in Hamburg under Sigmar Polke; in the 1970s he joined the Cologne art scene and worked with artists such as Martin Kippenberger, Georg Herold, and Jörg Immendorff. Since 2000 he has been a professor at the Düsseldorf Academy of Art. His works have been shown around the world, including at the Hamburg Kunsthalle, MoMA (New York), MUDAM (Luxemburg), Saatchi Gallery (London), and the Bonn Museum of Modern Art. Oehlen lives and works between La Palma and Switzerland.

Wolfgang Voigt, born in Cologne in 1961, is an artist, music producer, co-founder and -owner of Kompakt, a techno and electronic music label based in Cologne. He is one of the pioneers of the internationally successful minimal techno “Sound of Cologne”. His audiovisual project GAS, whose dense, hypnotic sonic artworks are often based on highly compressed classical audio samples, has received worldwide acclaim reaching far beyond the electronic and techno scene.

Böhm Chapel
Since fall 2010, this exceptional building has been used by Rafael Jablonka as an exclusive exhibition space for contemporary art. There is an intentional absence of display systems, partitions, and fixtures; all exhibited works hang in the five available alcoves or are free standing. There are two exhibitions per year.