Oehlen, Pendleton, Pope.L, Sillman | Galerie Max Hetzler | 04.11.2021-29.01.2022

until 29.01. | #3231ARTatBerlin | Galerie Max Hetzler shows from 4th November 2021 in the Window Gallery of Goethestraße 2/3 a group exhibition with works by the artists Albert Oehlen, Adam Pendleton, Pope.L and Amy Sillman.

This group exhibition is accompanied by a solo exhibition by Adam Pendleton at Galerie Max Hetzler, Paris, which explores the repetitive processes of writing and gesture in the artist’s drawings.

Oehlen, Pendleton, Pope.L, Sillman aims to highlight their specificities and divergences through a selection of paintings and drawings by four artists. These are works with a particular connection to the challenges of the painterly gesture and the dynamics of repetition. All the works shown here are not primarily about gestural expression, but about an area where the artistic signature is carried away by a process, a performance, a technology or some other advancement that transcends it. Albert Oehlen’s software presets and computer/painting mimesis; Adam Pendleton’s doubled brushwork, sprayed language and typographic fragments; Pope.L’s scaled, non-representational bastards on erasers; Amy Sillman’s grid of nonfgurative animation components: all are works in flux, in a state of constant making and reworking. While all present themselves in some sense as paintings or drawings, they simultaneously refer to the “non-painterly” by stringing together, multiplying, dispersing, setting in motion and throwing off the gesture. However, these are not similar or synchronised processes. On the contrary, the works illustrate different positions and intentions in relation to the transformation and translation of sources, the functions of writing and overwriting, and the critical role of abstraction. By bringing these works together, the exhibition aims to see them independently of each other.

Over the past four decades, Albert Oehlen (*1954, Krefeld) has repeatedly questioned the possibilities and methods of painting, creating an awareness of the medium that he continually seeks to reinvent and reshape. Through his various styles, forms and ways of working, Oehlen has expanded the concept of painting to what he himself wants to see. From inkjet printers to computer-aided design programs and references to the pixelated lines of computer screens, the artist has integrated new technologies into his work, constantly changing the parameters through self-imposed obstacles and challenges. In this way, Oehlen makes use of infinite combinations of forms, showing that these can be manipulated at the artist’s will to create new perceptual challenges for the viewer. Albert Oehlen lives and works in Switzerland. Since 1981, the artist has exhibited regularly at the Galerie Max Hetzler. Oehlen’s works have been shown in numerous solo exhibitions, including Serpentine Galleries, London; Kunstmuseum St. Gallen, St. Gallen; Museum Brandhorst, Munich (all 2019); Aïshti Foundation, Beirut; Palazzo Grassi, Venice (both 2018); Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes, Havana (2017); Cleveland Museum of Art, Cleveland; Guggenheim, Bilbao (both 2016); New Museum, New York; Kunsthalle Zürich (both 2015); mumok, Vienna (2013); Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, Paris (2009); Whitechapel Gallery, London (2006); and MOCA, Miami (2005). Works by the artist are in the collections of Museum Brandhorst, Munich; The Broad, Los Angeles; Centre Pompidou, Paris; The Cleveland Museum of Art, Cleveland; Fondation Louis Vuitton, Paris; Institut Valencià d’Art Modern, Valencia; Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles; MUDAM, Luxembourg; Musée d’art moderne de la Ville de Paris, Paris; Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; Museum of Contemporary Art – MOCA, Los Angeles; Museum für Moderne Kunst, Frankfurt am Main; Museum Ludwig, Cologne; Tate, London; Staatliche Kunstsammlung Dresden; and The Museum of Modern Art, New York.

Adam Pendleton (*1984, Richmond, VA) is an artist living in New York. For his paintings, drawings and other works, Pendleton uses letters, words, drips, splashes, sprays and assembled images as source material. The artist’s work is a kind of continuous writing in which language and gestural signs are recorded, transposed and overwritten. Blurring the boundaries between viewing and reading, between representation and abstraction, between painting, drawing and photography, Pendleton’s work is a pictorial philosophy of unfinished theses. In 2008, the artist began to articulate his work through the idea of Black Dada, a visual project and an ever-evolving exploration of the relationships between blackness, abstraction and the avant-garde. Adam Pendleton’s work is in the collections of major institutions including Museum of Modern Art, New York; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; Studio Museum Harlem, New York; Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh; Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego; Tate, London. The current exhibition of the artist Who Is Queen? at the Museum of Modern Art in New York opened in September and will be on view until 21 February 2022.

Pope.L (b. 1955, Newark, NJ) is known for his multidisciplinary work that encompasses performance, painting, writing, installation, video and sculpture, exposing binaries, oppositions and preconceived notions in contemporary culture. Since the 1970s, Pope.L has often performed strenuous, provocative and absurd performances and interventions in public spaces. The artist’s recent works have an intimate format and were created in response to Robert Ryman and his relationship to material, process and scale. Here Pope.L is interested in haptics and his own interventions with the material. For example, 12 standard-size Blick Art erasers are arranged in a grid and framed to form both the material and the ground of the work. The abstracted compositions of text, landscape and assemblage are complemented by an elongated signature of Ryman’s name.
Pope.L lives and works in Chicago, IL. The artist’s first performances took place on the street, then later in venues such as Anthology Film Archives (1981); Just Above Midtown (1983); Franklin Furnace (1991); The Sculpture Center (2000); all in New York; Mobius, Boston (2000); Shinjuku Station, Tokyo (2001); Diverse Works, Houston (2003); Cleveland Institute of Art, Ohio (2004); Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art, Gateshead Quays, UK (2005); MIT, Boston (2006); New Museum, New York (2010); Prospect 2, New Orleans (2011); Museum of Modern Art, New York (2011, 2012, 2019); Performa, New York (2013); Walker Art Center, Minneapolis (2014, 2016); Contemporary Arts Museum, Houston (2014); Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago (both 2015) and Whitney Biennial, New York (2017). Amy Sillman (b. 1955, Detroit, MI) considers drawing as the starting point for all her work. However, the artist also explores more gestural modes of production in her inkjet-printed and silkscreened canvases, zines and, more recently, her animated iPhone videos, in which she brings her digitally drawn figures to life as an exploration of her preferred media of painting and drawing and their respective boundaries. Sillman’s artistic work sits at the intersection of the abstract and the figurative. Her large-scale, gestural oil paintings, as well as her finer drawings, are multi-layered and complex reflections on themes of physicality, language and interrelationships, and often exhibit a humorous and cartoonish effect. For the 2015 work shown here, Sillman created 100 bathtub drawings that highlight her idiosyncratic formal pictorial approach.

Amy Sillman currently lives and works in New York. She has been a professor of painting at the Städelschule in Frankfurt am Main since 2015. Sillman’s work has been the subject of numerous solo exhibitions, including: The Arts Club of Chicago, Chicago; Camden Arts Centre, London; Albright Knox Art Gallery, Bufalo, New York; Drawing Center, New York; Portikus, Frankfurt am Main; and Kunsthaus Bregenz, Austria. Sillman’s solo exhibition “one lump or two”, first shown at the Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston in 2014, subsequently travelled to the Aspen Art Museum in Colorado and the Center for Curatorial Studies at Bard College in New York. Her work is in the public collections of prominent institutions such as the Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago; Brooklyn Museum, New York; Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington D.C.; Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Museum of Modern Art, New York; and Whitney Museum of American Art, New York.

Opening: Thursday, 4th November 2021, 5:00 – 8:00 pm.

Exhibition dates: Thursday, 4th November 2021 – Saturday, 29th January 2022

Image caption: Adam Pendleton, Untitled (WE ARE NOT), 2021 © Adam Pendleton

Exhibition Oehlen, Pendleton, Pope.L, Sillman – Galerie Max Hetzler | Contemporary Art – Zeitgenössische Kunst in Berlin – Exhibitions Berlin Galleries – ART at Berlin