In Short

“This mirror idea allowed me to make an 'original' invention, but one that is bearable because it is so hackneyed” – Albert Oehlen

Depicting a somber gallery wall, Im Museum II is an important early example from Albert Oehlen’s Mirror Paintings series, or “Spiegelbilder.” In these seminal works, completed between 1982 and 1990, the artist rendered rooms in a muted palette of earthy colors punctuated by actual fragments of mirrors collaged directly onto the canvas. The Mirror Paintings constitute a pivotal series in Oehlen’s oeuvre, sitting between the Bad Paintings and raw figurative works of his early career and the “post-non-objective” paintings of the late 1980s and 1990s. Embodying an idiosyncratic approach to light, scale, and color, which would permeate his later series, these paintings solidified Oehlen’s reputation as a master subverter of painterly tradition. One of Oehlen’s earliest bodies of work, the Mirror Paintings are currently being reconsidered as a decisive moment in his career, and were the subject of exhibitions at Galerie Max Heltzer and Nahmad Contemporary last year. In his 2020 essay, “Albert Oehlen’s Mirror Paintings, An Inescapable Contingency,” Raphael Rubinstein analyzes the series by what he considers to be the three defining characteristics of the works: that they are simultaneously “paintings with mirrors,” “paintings with things attached to them,” and “room paintings.”[i]

A Painting with Mirrors Mirrors, of course, have been recurrent motifs in the history of art for centuries, featuring in the paintings of Diego Velázquez and Johannes Vermeer as well as in Japanese ukiyo-e. Actual mirrors, as opposed to images, have also had a prominent role in art at least since Enrico Baj’s mirror on brocade works from the 1950s; the following decade, mirrors began turning up continually, such as in Yayoi Kusama’s Infinity Mirror Rooms, Michelangelo Pistoletto’s Quadri Specchianti, and Gerhard Richter’s 4 Panes of Glass, 1967, Herbert Foundation, Ghent.
A Painting with Things Attached to It Through the 19^th century, artists very rarely attached objects to the surface of any painted support. In this sense, Im Museum II positions itself within an art historical lineage of modernism begun by Pablo Picasso’s Still Life with Chair Caning, 1912. Subsequently, innumerable works—such as Kurt Schwitter’s Merzbild assemblages and Francis Picabia’s Portrait of Cézanne, 1920—further interrupted pictorial illusion with actual three-dimensionality. By gluing mirrors on his paintings, Oehlen thrust himself into two 20^th century modes of art-making: “the mirror-work and the painting-with-object-attached.”[ii] A Room Painting “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,” Oehlen elucidated. “Museum, apartment, Hitler’s headquarters, things like that: a summons to appear in the picture.”[iii] By placing the viewer—and ostensibly the room he or she is in—within the painting, Im Museum II reflects both the closeness and dissidence between the dark corners of the past and our present. [i] Raphael Rubinstein, “Albert Oehlen’s Mirror Paintings, An Inescapable Contingency,” Albert Oehlen: Spiegelbilder / Mirror Paintings 1982-1990, Berlin, 2020, pp. 9-21. [ii] Raphael Rubinstein, “Albert Oehlen’s Mirror Paintings, An Inescapable Contingency,” Albert Oehlen: Spiegelbilder / Mirror Paintings 1982-1990, Berlin, 2020, p. 13. [iii] Albert Oehlen, quoted in Wilfred Dickhoff and Martin Prinzhorn, Kunst Heute, no. 7, 1990, p. 37.		Johannes Vermeer, The Music Lesson, circa 1662. Royal Collection, London, Photo credit: HIP / Art Resource, NY Thomas Struth, Louvre III, 1989. Musee National d'Art Moderne, Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris, Photo credit: Philippe Migeat © CNAC/MNAM/Dist. RMN-Grand Palais / Art Resource, NY, Artwork © 2020 Thomas Struth

- Provenance
  Galerie Max Hetzler, Stuttgart
  The Metzger Collection, Essen
  Galerie Max Hetzler, Berlin
  Acquired from the above by the present owner in 2004
- Exhibited
  Stuttgart, Galerie Max Hetzler, Albert Oehlen: Montparnasse, da war das Leben klasse, September 3 – 30, 1982
  Bologna, Galleria d’Arte Moderna; Essen, Museum Folkwang, La giovane pittura in Germania – Die junge Malerei in Deutschland, November 20, 1982 - January 10, 1983, p. 88 (illustrated)
  Kunsthalle Budapest; Tampere, Sara Hildén Art Museum, German Expressionism in the Metzger Collection, January 24 – November 18, 1984, no. 110, p. 138 (illustrated, p. 6)
  Berlin, Galerie Max Hetzler, Albert Oehlen: Gemälde Paintings 1980-1982, May 24 – June 22, 2002, p. 32 (illustrated, p. 33)
  Karlsruhe, Museum für Neue Kunst, Obsessive Malerei: Ein Rückblick auf die Neuen Wilden Karlsruhe, September 27, 2003 - January 4, 2004, p. 15 (illustrated, p. 183)
- Literature
  Albert Oehlen: Spiegelbilder / Mirror Paintings 1982-1990, exh. cat., Galerie Max Hetzler, Berlin, 2020, p. 17 (illustrated)