
Albert Oehlen
The works in “Home and Garden,” the first major retrospective of Albert Oehlen’s work in New York, explore separate but parallel universesrepresentation and abstraction, manual dexterity and pixelated matrixand commonly bring both together at once. Oehlen is a skilled painter, despite the sensation of glum helplessness his work often evokes, an emotional tenor fortuitously coincidental with (and generative of) our moment in art history when the “de-skilling” of painting passes for fiat: Expressionism as “inexpessionist painting . . . a pretext for an analysis of the act of painting