Carsten Nicolai + Albert Oehlen
Grau
September 15 - October 29, 2022
Galerie EIGEN * ART Berlin
During Berlin Art Week 2022, Galerie EIGEN + ART Berlin opens the exhibition Grau - a collaboration between Carsten Nicolai and the painter and installation artist Albert Oehlen. Following on from the joint sound and light installation with the same title, which was presented in Switzerland last year, new canvas works by Carsten Nicolai and paper works by Albert Oehlen have been created for the exhibition at Galerie EIGEN + ART. While Nicolai worked on ten minimal colour surfaces in which the entire canvas absorbs the grey, Oehlen focused on ten watercolours in which the grey colour sometimes appears like an abstract sign, sometimes like a concrete portrait and assumes different degrees of intensity. Placed next to each other, these series of pictures merge to a dyptichon that opens up a third examination of the colour grey in addition to the individual preoccupation with it. This is further enhanced by the invitation to place Oehlen's almost transparent portraits in the imaginary on Nicolai's powerful canvases, whereby the colour surfaces seem to move into one another and thus epitomise a constant changeability. Analogous to this individual bringing together, however, the entire exhibition is to be understood as only one part of a process that was already preceded by a period of joint work by the two artists, and which is not yet concluded with this show.