CATALOGUE ESSAYS

Albert Oehlen’s Mirror Paintings, An Inescapable Contingency

Raphael Rubinstein

Once Upon a Time in . . . Germany

Imagine, for a moment, that it’s 1982 and you are a young painter working in West Germany. You find yourself in an exciting yet complex situation. Since the end of the 1970s, painting, especially figurative painting, has “returned” with a vengeance throughout the West. The medium’s resurgence has been confirmed and further empowered by large-scale exhibitions like A New Spirit in Painting at London’s Royal Academy in 1981, or two more recent shows closer to home, Zeitgeist in Berlin and Documenta 7 in Kassel. Among the stars of these exhibitions are many German painters, including Gerhard Richter, Sigmar Polke, Georg Baselitz, Jörg Immendorf, Markus Lüpertz, A.R. Penck, and Anselm Kiefer. In Germany much of the attention is going to the so-called Neue Wilde, a wave of young neo-expressionist painters whose canvases are filled with anguished figures, slashing brushstrokes, and bold colors. After a decade or more when painting was considered by many to be outmoded and reactionary, it’s suddenly a good time to be a painter, at least if you are a young white male (most of these shows do notably poor jobs of including women and minorities). 

According to some, this embrace of figurative painting, and a simultaneous appetite for recycling the modernist past, is part of a widespread conservative turn. There’s no doubt that in the era of Thatcher and Reagan it’s become harder to hold on to the countercultural movements of the 1970s and what seemed like a center-left consensus. In West Germany, too, there has been a shift to the right, confirmed by the collapse of the social-liberal coalition that has governed the country since 1969 and the election of a conservative government under Christian Democrat Chancellor Helmut Kohl. On the youth-culture front, the iconoclasm of punk has been replaced by the stylish hedonism of the New Romantics and the hook-laden tunes and smart wardrobes of countless synth-pop bands. “Like punk never happened,” British music writer Dave Rimmer will lament in 1986 in a book about Culture Club and “the new pop.” These political and cultural crosscurrents are not easy to navigate. Your ambition as an artist is great, as is your love of painting, but you can’t forget the lessons of punk, even though you aren’t sure its anyone-can-get-up-and-play ethic can be successfully applied to painting. Situationist slogans are still rattling around your brain and you remember Guy Debord’s stern dictum, “As a trick art must be suppressed, and as a promise it must be realized,” yet you are also deeply skeptical about the anti-art, we-are-the-revolution stances of the previous generation, deeply skeptical and more than a little bored. There is so much content at the door of your paintings, clamoring to be let in, all those awkward, embarrassing subjects that were excluded from art in the wake of Minimalism, all the messy matière that Conceptualism didn’t wish to dirty its hands with, all the laughter that serious artists weren’t supposed to enjoy. Time’s up for prohibitions. In the words of a famous May ’68 slogan, “Il est interdit d’interdire” (it’s forbidden to forbid). As long ago as 1966, Immendorf had concisely stated the position in a crudely done, blatantly contradictory oil painting of a bed and a hat mostly obliterated by a big X and the phrase “Hört auf zu malen” or “Stop Painting.” So, there’s nothing else to do but to start painting. At first you have to fake it a little, but pretty soon it starts to turn into something real.

The style of painting you develop—painterly figuration so rapid that, as one critic remarks, a painting is often finished before the first brushstroke dries—shares some superficial features with the Neue Wilde painters, which leads to a lot of misunderstandings. Still it’s impossible to ignore the overall assurance of your painting style, as if you can’t be bothered with any second thoughts. Where does such confidence come from? Maybe from the fact that you already know the painting is going to be a failure. And how could it not be, given the state of art history, the state of the world, the state of Germany. You must claim the freedom to paint badly, to paraphrase Isaac Babel, and to do so with “a certain vitality,” to paraphrase Pasolini, and if the painting survives all of this mistreatment intact, then these freedoms will protect your work like a vaccine. All this happens partly by design and partly by the inertia of circumstance. Good and bad, abstraction and figuration, new and old, all those useless dichotomies dissolve in the fact of the paintings you make, in the reality of the studio. As the young painters Albert Oehlen, Werner Büttner, and Martin Kippenberger will put it in an 1984 exhibition title, Warheit ist Arbeit, Truth Is Work.

A Wilderness of Mirrors

Art can be slow to reveal itself. Even when work gains immediate recognition, as was the case with the Spiegelbilder or Mirror Paintings, a series of oil paintings with mirrors attached to them that Albert Oehlen created between 1982 and 1990, time must pass before we can begin to grasp its fuller relationship to its epoch, and to ours. Now, nearly forty years later, the implications and importance of this distinctive body of work—to art history and to our understanding of Oehlen’s work in general—are emerging. 

It was only in 1981, while finishing his studies with Sigmar Polke at the Hochschule für bildende Künste in Hamburg, that Oehlen started painting in oil, a significant change from the latex house paint he had relied on, usually in whatever colors were on sale at 1000 Töpfe, a household furnishings store where he bought most of his materials. When looking at the Mirror Paintings it’s vital to keep in mind that during the nearly ten years he was producing them Oehlen was also making many other kinds of work that didn’t feature mirrors. He painted numerous self-portraits (mostly full-length, but they include a small head-shot from 1983 painted on a mirror) and many interiors, as well as canvases where roughly-depicted objects share space with hand-painted textual fragments, often taken from the discourse of radical leftist politics of the 1960s and 1970s (the Abstraktes Bild series). In the mid-1980s he made a dramatic but temporary shift in his palette by introducing primary colors, which he used, most notoriously, for a portrait of Adolf Hitler. Oehlen also made countless collages, numerous artist books and worked collaboratively with other artists, along with his occasional membership in noise-loving bands such as Red Krayola and Van Oehlen, and, in 1987, designing a production of Wagner’s Tannhäuser for the Bremen Opera. While an important, indeed crucial, component of Oehlen’s work in the 1980s, the Mirror Paintings are part of a much larger story.

On the subject of mirrors in art, it’s hard to know where to begin. Depictions of mirrors, and the mirror images within them, have recurred throughout the history of painting at a frequency close to that of female nudes or arrangements of ripe fruit. The mirror is not only a Western trope—Japanese ukiyo-e, those Edo-period paintings and prints depicting the pleasures of the “floating world,” for instance, are rife with images of women studying themselves in mirrors. Actual mirrors, rather than images of them, have been turning up in artworks at least since Enrico Baj’s mirror-and-brocade experiments of the late 1950s. These were followed by a wave of mirror art in the 1960s, most notably Michelangelo Pistoletto’s Quadri Specchianti (1962), Yayoi Kusama’s Infinity Mirror Rooms (beginning in 1965), Art & Language’s mirror-on-the-wall Untitled Painting (1965), and Robert Smithson’s Yucatan Mirror Displacements (1969). Mention should also be made of Gerhard Richter’s 4 Panes of Glass (1967) and two works titled Mirror first presented in 1981 in a two-person show with Georg Baselitz at the Kunsthalle Düsseldorf. Both consisted of nothing more than a large mirror (about 7 ½ by 10 ½ feet each) fastened to the gallery wall, a far cry, as we will see, from Oehlen’s Mirror Paintings, which commenced the following year. 

An alternative to getting lost in this wilderness of mirrors (to borrow T.S. Eliot’s phrase) would be to focus on the objecthood of Oehlen’s mirrors, that is, to describe them not as “paintings with mirrors attached to them” but as “paintings with things attached to them.” Until the early twentieth century, it was rare for a painter to attach anything to the surface of the painted support. At most, a loaded brush would deposit a generous amount of paint, but otherwise, objects of any kind were excluded from the medium of painting. As we know, this changed forever in 1912 when Picasso stuck a piece of faux chair canning onto a cubist still life and thus definitively ruptured the membrane between the pictorial and the actual. In the modernist works that quickly followed, such as Vladimir Tatlin’s “painterly reliefs,” Kurt Schwitters’s funky Merzbild assemblages, and, perhaps most strikingly, Francis Picabia’s scabrous Portrait of Cézanne (1920), which featured a mangy-looking stuffed toy monkey nailed to a piece of wood, the illusionistic space that had been a feature of European painting since the Renaissance was interrupted by actual three-dimensionality, projecting not into the picture but protruding into the space of the viewer.

When, about 1960, an emerging generation of artists reconnected with the disruptive spirit of Dada, there was a new wave of encrusted wall reliefs and paintings sprouting fungi-like attachments. The artist who most explicitly embraced this attached-object or assemblage aesthetic was Daniel Spoerri, whose Snare Pictures involve items from everyday life (often remnants of meals) glued onto tabletops that are then mounted on the wall like paintings. Robert Rauschenberg’s combines, which he began making in 1954, also bristle with glued-down objects (not infrequently including mirrors), as does the work of Niki de Saint Phalle, Wolf Vostell, and many others. What these objects erupting from the wall seemed to promise was a more immediate, less mediated access to the real or, as art critic Pierre Restany dubbed it, a “new realism.” 

Underlying this attraction toward things rather than images was a bias against painting. As the 1960s progressed, the medium of painting came under ever-greater attacks not just from the assemblage-based aesthetic of neo-Dada and Nouveau Réalisme, but also from Minimalism, which favored what Donald Judd in 1965 termed “specific objects,” three-dimensional works that were neither painting nor sculpture, and Fluxus, which wanted to do away with the object altogether. As we know, painting never quite died, but after 1960 it always had to contend with a perceived separation from real life. According to Frank Stella, the biggest problem with painting, specifically with abstraction, was its “inability to project a real sense of space.” When Stella set out to reenergize painting in the 1970s, he did so by forsaking the stretched canvas for painted aluminum wall reliefs. Subsequently, a number of younger American artists such as Elizabeth Murray and Julian Schnabel also began using attached objects and projecting elements to extend their paintings into actual space.

Thus, when Oehlen began gluing mirrors onto his paintings in 1982, he was inserting himself into two ongoing modes: the mirror-work and the painting-with-object-attached. And yet, both then and now, his Mirror Paintings do not fit easily into either one of these familiar artistic tropes. In part, this resistance is a consequence of the brash insolence that was characteristic of much of Oehlen’s work throughout the 1980s, when his subjects careened from expressionistic dinosaurs (dinosaurs!) to absurdist architectural fragments to abject or grotesque self-portraits, all executed in an apparently insouciant painting style. The work was too full of emphatic content for conceptual tastes and too casual-looking for modernist sensibilities.

It’s perhaps worthwhile to compare Oehlen’s practice of sticking mirrors onto his paintings with Herold’s Ziegeldbilder or Brick Paintings of the 1980s, monochrome paintings to which Herold attached bricks that caused the canvas to stretch and sag. Though mirrors and bricks are very different kinds of propositions, both are in conflict with the normal workings of painting. (We could also think about how so many of the Mirror Paintings depict brick walls.) A canvas loaded with bricks or mirrors is subjected to something that verges on mistreatment. It looks as if Oehlen and Herold wanted to push the medium to its breaking point, or discover that maybe it didn’t have one. Kippenberger also enjoyed attaching things to paintings. In 1985, he and Oehlen collaborated on an irreverent artist’s book titled The Cologne Manifesto, which involved them pasting ludicrous “I heart” stickers throughout twenty-five copies of a book by famed photojournalist Ernst Haas. They added a dust jacket and slipcase to complete their act of appropriation. Oehlen is keenly aware of the implications that come with attaching something to a painting. In a conversation with John Corbett, apropos of Willem de Kooning’s use of collage in Woman I (1950–1952), he observes, “There could be many reasons for putting something found in a painting.” But then adds, with more than a touch of irony, “Naturally a painter should not glue anything to a painting, especially not for an aesthetic effect. If he does, he’d better have a good reason, like being incapable or too lazy to paint it.” There is also some evident irony when Oehlen tells interviewers Jörg Heiser and Jan Verwoert in 2003: “Following a self-imposed set of guidelines certainly gives you more momentum. Forbidding yourself certain things, believing in rules, is a good state to be in. That’s the way to develop as an artist, by giving yourself instructions what to do next. One rule could be: don’t stick anything on to the picture surface.”

This might be a good place to highlight the importance of collage for Oehlen throughout his career, from the Ewige Feile series (1983), where photographs of naked young women from naturalist magazines are kept company by journalistic images of war and consumer goods, to the large-scale abstractions he would make on Spanish advertising posters in the early 2000s. In the catalogue of an important three-person 1989 exhibition (with Christopher Wool and Georg Herold) at the Renaissance Society in Chicago, Oehlen contributed collages where incongruous images are added to reproductions of his Mirror Paintings. By subjecting his own paintings to irreverent and disorientating treatment Oehlen is clearly not exempting himself nor his work from the exuberant criticality that has characterized his entire career.

One reason the Renaissance Society show is important to Oehlen’s reception in the U.S., and perhaps elsewhere, is that it presented his work in a context that had nothing to do with German neo-expressionist painting. In a catalogue essay, Ian Brunskill notes how in the early 1980s “Oehlen found himself in strange company. He appeared in survey shows surrounded by self-consciously exuberant authenticity and self-consciously doom-laden moral grandeur. His own work, like that of his colleagues, Werner Büttner and Martin Kippenberger, didn’t quite fit. The execution may have looked messy enough, but there was an aggression too ugly to be called exuberant, a specificity of political and moral concern too awkward to be grand.” A similar point is made in a 2012 essay by curator Christoph Schreier who astutely points out that Oehlen’s embrace of figurative painting in the early 1980s should not be explained solely as part of the then-widespread “hunger for images” that attempted “to counteract the bleakness of Conceptual and Minimal Art with a new kind of opulence.” Instead, he argues, Oehlen adopted the critical attitude of conceptual art, but, in contrast to the anti-painting stance of most conceptual artists, he “articulate[d] it not from the outside, but from the inside—from inside the painting itself.” Or, as Oehlen himself put it, “The idea at the time was really that every artistic means, every technique deserved the punishment it received.” Perhaps nowhere else is Oehlen’s practice of criticizing painting from within the medium more explicit and emblematic than in the Mirror Paintings.

Designs for Living

The Mirror Paintings are not only mirror paintings and paintings with things attached to them, they are also what might be called “room paintings,” that is to say, they always depict some kind of architectural space, usually an interior. While quite a few Mirror Paintings are untitled, many others carry titles that reference the built world: Raum (Room, 1984); Treppenhaus Alt (Old Staircase, 1982); Kotzimmer (Excrement Room, 1982); Rotes Haus (Red House, 1985); In der Wohnung (In the Apartment, 1982); Atelier (Studio, 1984); several paintings titled Im Museum (In the Museum) and, in one of the earliest Mirror Paintings and one of the largest, Raum für phantasievolle Aktionen (Space for Imaginative Actions, 1983). The variety of these spaces is striking. Some, such as Raum (p. xxx), look like basements partially closed off by cinderblock walls (inevitably evoking the Berlin Wall); others, such as Treppenhaus Alt (p. xxx), present dramatic views of circular staircases; and many others portray drab domestic spaces. A relatively large canvas, Treppenhaus Alt features five separate mirrors, as well as subtle passages of purple spray paint, small clumps of paint scrapings, and a stark up/down division (sinuous railings above, a gridded floor below) that could almost read as a visual allegory of nineteenth-versus twentieth-century design. In 1991, just after he had made what remains the last of the Mirror Paintings, Oehlen explained why he paired mirrors and architecture, and also how he went about choosing which spaces to paint: “I only used mirrors in pictures depicting rooms, so that the viewer can place himself in the room. These rooms were chosen not on the basis of design, or architecture, or any other such criteria, but on the basis of their meaning, which I attribute to them in relation to society. Museum, apartment, Hitler’s headquarters, things like that: a summons to appear in the picture.”

Before we consider the kinds of spaces Oehlen chose, and the historical and societal issues those choices invoke, we need to ask: Why attach mirrors onto paintings of interiors and not onto any other kind of painting? Oehlen’s explanation—“so that the viewer can place himself in the room”—focuses on the moment when viewers see their refection in one of the mirrors, but most of the time Oehlen’s mirrors reflect empty space rather than human figures. This means that the mirrors on the Mirror Paintings generally reflect the same kind of subject matter as depicted in the painting: an interior (assuming, of course, that paintings will nearly always be exhibited inside a building). There is thus a consistency, even a tautological relationship, between what Oehlen paints and what the mirrors in his paintings reflect, which, obviously, wouldn’t be the case if the Mirror Paintings carried images of landscapes or still lifes or human figures. 

Since its origins in the 1960s, conceptual art has been fascinated with tautology, with the ways in which works of art can establish internal redundancies that undermine our assumptions about representation. It’s no surprise, then, that conceptual artists frequently utilize mirrors in their work. But despite the depicted rooms plus mirrors equation, Oehlen isn’t interested in tautology. If he were, he probably wouldn’t paint over parts of the mirrors so frequently, often to incorporate them into the depicted scene.

On an untitled painting with four mirrors from 1984 showing a room containing a gray built-in bookcase and a purple curtain (p. xxx), Oehlen placed one of the mirrors so that it covers part of the curtain and bookcase (the mirrors are always attached to already painted surfaces). He then added vertical purple and gray strokes onto the mirror to assimilate it into the picture, though by the mere fact of being painted onto a reflective mirror instead of an absorbent canvas, these brushy lines stand out. The spines of the books are economically delineated with loose brushstrokes of rust orange, charred-wood black, and drab cement gray, while the floor and wall of the room feature copious paint drips—some of them oriented sideways—in deliberately unpleasant shades of scum-like green and corrosive orange. Like nearly all the Mirror Paintings, this canvas offers a wealth of bravura painting moves: layered tempests of broad wet-into-wet brushstrokes, strategic spills of multi-directional drips, declarative lines, brittle lines, flurries of brief brushwork, and what seems like a hundred different textures. 

In the earlier Ofen I (1982; p. xxx), which features an antique heating stove and another bookcase, the pattern of a brick wall is extended over a mirror. In so many of Oehlen’s other paintings, it’s not the details from the depicted room that are painted on or around the mirrors, but segments of the errant diagrammatic lines that shoot across the composition. Frequently, the mirrors in or on a painting are connected by networks of spindly lines that, like the mirrors themselves, seem to blithely disregard the underlying scene; together, the mirrors and their connecting framework superimpose a diagrammatic space onto the roughly perspectival space. Complicating matters still further, the mirrors in these rather drab and dark-colored rooms—brown, beige, ochre, and dirty grays predominate—generally reflect much brighter, cleaner spaces. In photographs of these paintings when the mirrors haven’t been totally overpainted, one can catch glimpses of well-lit, white-walled rooms, which could be the artist’s studio or a gallery or some museum storage area. The inescapable contingency of Oehlen’s mirrors—the way in which they remind us that the painting was located in a specific place when it was photographed, and that paintings are not mere images but objects in the world, in our world—is subtly disruptive. Should we consider the reflected images as part of the work or dismiss them as accidental effects? To ignore what the mirrors capture, whether in photographs or when we ourselves stand in front of one of the Mirror Paintings, means to exclude a crucial component of these paintings, the very component that gives them their name. 

Given these perceptual complexities, along with the garish abjection of Oehlen’s palette and the devil-may-care attacks of his brushwork, it can be easy to miss the painterly richness of the Mirror Paintings, their adroit and daring mixture of painting techniques, the moments when materials interact to produce patches of unexpected beauty, like a “waterfall” effect in the door of a clunky building in Rotes Haus (Red House, 1985; p. xxx) or the De Kooningesque outburst of refracted light behind a wire-mesh window in an untitled 1982 painting (p. xxx). Another discovery to make is how the paintings change from the early 1980s to the end of the decade. In the later work, as in an untitled picture of a spiral staircase from 1989 (p. xxx), the paint tends to be more liquid, resulting in smoother, less impastoed surfaces; brushstrokes surrender their starring role to arrays of elongated drips.

One wonders, at times, whether the rooms depicted in the Mirror Paintings correspond to any actual places. An unidentified black and white photograph in the catalogue for Das Geld, Oehlen’s 1984 show at Max Hetzler in Cologne, suggests that they do. It shows the corner of what looks like a long-abandoned room where one wall is a sloppy amalgam of large white tiles, plaster, and bricks, a scene that resembles many of the Mirror Paintings. 

The rooms that appear in the Mirror Paintings can also be unsettling, none more so than one of the first works in the series, Morgenlicht fällt ins Führerhauptquartier (The Morning Light Falls into the Fuhrer’s Headquarters, 1982; p. xxx). Evidently based on a room in the 1939 Reich Chancellery building designed by Albert Speer, the large painting depicts an enormous formal room lined with massive windows and doorways. A geometric shape in the lower right is instantly recognizable as a swastika, and a tall, narrow mirror is attached to the right side of the canvas (part of the swastika is painted over it). Art historian Gregory H. Williams has noted how, in contrast to the symbol in Sigmar Polke’s much earlier drawing The Apparition of the Swastika (circa 1963), “Oehlen’s Hakenkreuz is not simply a disengaged sign appearing in an unexpected place; here it brings the ‘light’ into Hitler’s headquarters. But the clumsiness delivered by the mirrors, as well as the sign’s awkward, skittering motion, lends it enough absurdity to keep it outside the bounds of sober discourse on national guilt.” Oehlen’s swastika is further defamiliarized by being depicted as a reversed image, as if seen, appropriately enough, in a mirror.

After the 1980s, there are no more such references to German history in Oehlen’s work. To a certain extent this is a consequence of his shift around 1990 to abstraction, but the disappearance of this kind of content is also the result of the artist’s decision to turn elsewhere for his subjects. As he later recalled, “Rainald Goetz once said to me that every German artist must at some point address recent German history. But then he should leave it alone for good.”

A similarly grand room appears in Abschaffung einer Militärdiktatur (Abolishment of a Military Dictatorship, 1984; p. xxx), but instead of a swastika intruding, Oehlen has a fallen, mutilated, monumental statue, presumably of an overthrown dictator. The floor onto which the monument has collapsed is rendered with a corrosive shade of orange that suggests some incredibly ugly institutional carpet. As so often, Oehlen’s palette is as abrasive and restless as his brushwork. If Morgenlicht fällt ins Führerhauptquartier looks back to a dark chapter in Germany’s history, Abschaffung einer Militärdiktatur seems prophetic, anticipating by five years the collapse of the Communist regimes throughout Eastern Europe. Other versions of this chamber appear in what may be the strangest of the Mirror Paintings: Raum für phantasievolle Aktionen (Space for Imaginative Actions, 198; p. xxx) and Als hätte man mir die Muschel rausgedreht I and II (As if Somebody Had Screwed Out My Shell I and II, 1982; pp. xxx and xxx), all of which feature a harp and a pair of disembodied hands and forearms, sometimes playing the harp. In all three paintings, images of framed mirrors hanging on the walls share the canvas with the real mirrors. None of these rooms that Oehlen depicts, whether official or domestic, are very inviting, and many of them are forbidding and ominous. Could it be that the mirrors are some kind of charm, objects to ward off the evil eye like the mirrors sewn into shisha embroideries?

The most historically specific of the Mirror Paintings deals not with German history but with events that occurred in 1978 at what was then the Long Kesh Detention Centre (now Her Majesty’s Prison Maze), a British prison in Northern Ireland. Angered over how they were being treated, imprisoned members of the Irish Republican Army (IRA) began refusing to wash, wear clothes, or leave their cells, which they soon started to smear with their own feces in what became known as the “dirty protest.” Eventually their resistance escalated into a prolonged hunger strike that, by 1981, took the lives of ten men. Oehlen’s Kotzimmer (Excrement Room, 1982; p. xxx), which employs a composition that closely resembles one of the published photographs from Long Kesh, shows the inside of a prison cell, the walls of which are covered with slashing, wet-into-wet brushstrokes of excremental browns, yellows, olive greens, and discolored whites, though there is also an area of less noxious velvety black in the foreground. (It should be noted that a similar palette is used in other Mirror Paintings, suggesting that Kotzimmer may be merely an explicit materialization of what elsewhere remains an implicit abjection.) In several places Oehlen has painted brown handprints, elongated to give the impression that they have been dragged down the wall. Six small, square mirrors, connected by a network of spindly white lines, are distributed around the painting. In contrast to many of the other Mirror Paintings, Oehlen made no effort to assimilate the mirrors into the composition by painting on top of them.

In the context of the other Mirror Paintings, which depict mostly domestic spaces but also a number of public ones, Kotzimmer presents us with a dramatic collision of private and public; the prison cell where someone must live their day-to-day existence is also embedded in an oppressive institutional structure. Paintings, too, Oehlen may be telling us, parcel out their existence between public and private spaces. And so, of course, do we—the viewers and visitors whose faces might appear momentarily in these mirrors, who live in their own rooms, who might seek their own space for imaginative actions, or totally fail to do so. 

So many undecidables. So many mirrors. So many paintings. So much speculation. As John Ashbery observed in his famous 1974 poem “Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror,” the word speculation comes from speculum, Latin for mirror. In some ways, the reflective surfaces that stud the Mirror Paintings are emblematic of the relentless speculation, the great openness, that has characterized Oehlen’s entire career. Through his unceasing artistic renewal, Oehlen insists on only one thing, that painting remain an open question, a visual space in which anything might appear, just as anything might appear in one of those glued-on mirrors, always ready to meet us with its infinite, unpredictable, disruptive hospitality.