In der Wohnung is a book about the long-standing tradition of representations of domestic interiors. Since antiquity, painting has played with the motif of the interior: the symbol of depth, evoked by every form of illustration. It has always been an important subject to Albert Oehlen, a German painter now based in Appenzell, Switzerland. In his latest collages he works with source materials drawn from art history, transforming works by the likes of Vuillard and Dalí into pop art “panels”. In collaboration with Oehlen, Fredi Fischli and Niels Olsen put together a collective exhibition in the spring of 2014 at the Gebert Stiftung für Kultur in Rapperswil-Jona near Zürich, spanning the broad range of different approaches to the painting of interiors in contemporary art. The book In der Wohnung has now come out in the series STUDIOLO / Edition Patrick Frey. It is a journey through time that begins in a landscape in which the viewer comes across works from Oehlen’s oeuvre referring to paintings by Thomas Arnolds, Richard Artschwager, Mike Kelley, Martin Kippenberger, Roy Lichtenstein et al. Then we see a building in the landscape, rooms inside that building, and we have arrived for a tour of the Albert Oehlen exhibition In der Wohnung.
Most beautiful Swiss books, 2015