Artist: Albert Oehlen

Gagosian presents Endless Summer, an exhibition of new paintings by Albert Oehlen. The paintings explore the theme of the bather, a motif deeply embedded in French art history that captivated such artists as Pierre Bonnard, Paul Cézanne, Édouard Manet, and Pablo Picasso.

The bather has maintained a significant and diverse presence throughout the history of art, and in Endless Summer, Oehlen contributes to the tradition in characteristically expressive style. Presenting variations on a dark-haired female nude, he sometimes approaches, sometimes retreats from his ostensible subject, using it as a template for unbounded experimentation. While the woman’s shape is clearly legible in some paintings, in others it dissolves into pure gesture, shifting Oehlen’s project continually between representation and abstraction.

Neither directly observed nor wholly improvised, Oehlen’s recurring figure originates in Tramonto Spaventoso (Terrifying Sunset, 1940–49) by the Russian-born American modernist painter John Graham, whose work Oehlen discovered in the 1990s. Embellishing, reworking, and recontextualizing Graham’s image, the artist combines graphic gestures and “painterly” drips with surprising color combinations and textural obfuscations. The density of the compositions also varies—some are packed with formal incident, while others appear relatively sparse.

In Endless Summer, Oehlen again tests the limits of coherence, reinventing a long-established motif while rejecting the quest for stable form and meaning.

Endless Summer is presented in the Paris galleries of Gagosian and Galerie Max Hetzler, and is accompanied by a copublished catalogue featuring an essay by Jean-Pierre Criqui and an interview with Max Dax about Albert Oehlen’s filmmaking.