| Summary: | Since the 1980s, from both sides of the Atlantic, the artists Albert Oehlen and Julian Schnabel have continually questioned and reinvented painting with the help of conceptual strategies, an open approach to style, and a surprising use of found materials. They have been friends for three decades, and now, at a 2018 exhibition at Galerie Max Hetzler Berlin, they interconnect their current artistic positions and their shared past. Beside large-format canvases and smaller works on paper, the two present portraits they made of each other: Albert Oehlen in an oversized, ecclesiastical-looking frock in a positively baroque painting from 1997, and Julian Schnabel in strictly gray hues lounging on a couch, painted specifically for the occasion. In his new paintings shown here, Oehlen reworks the forms and colors he first used in his early abstract work of the mid-1980s with an evolved easiness of invention. Schnabel at that time started painting on used tarpaulins, and here again he collects found fabric, painting on the covers for market stands in Mexico. These bring their own specific marks and stories, over which the artist adds large gestural forms that evoke landscapes, flowers, or figures. An essay by art historian Christian Malycha elucidates this special meeting of minds, while painter Glenn Brown delivers a veritable declaration of love for the work of his two colleagues.
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