Markus Oehlen

In his most recent decade of work, the fabled Neue Wilde painter continues to defy genre with his colorful, chaotic and fragmentary art

German painter Markus Oehlen (born 1956) has remained staunchly outside of the artistic establishment since the beginning of his career in the late 1970s, when he aligned himself with the Neue Wilde--sometimes called Junge Wilde--movement in opposition to minimalism. His early work was instinct-driven, gestural and decidedly anarchic in composition; while his later work is slightly more restrained, the artist continues to eschew traditional narrative interpretation with amorphous shapes, references to pop culture and a consistently eye-catching color palette. This publication focuses on a selection of Oehlen's work from the past decade, during which he further honed his style into a consistently kaleidoscopic collage of digital and traditional elements. Evoking op-art tendencies while still remaining definitively outside of traditional genre categorization, Oehlen's most recent pieces use layers of neon to create highly textured, mind-bending patterns.