Albert Oehlen (b. 1954)

‘At the time I posed the self-portrait as a problem for myself in my search for new levels of difficulty, precisely because there’s a huge historical apparatus attached to it, and because it makes you think of art, of seriousness and meaning… Strangely, I have the feeling that my self-portraits are different from all the self-portraits by others. I forget that quite a few painters have had equally crazy experimental setups that led them to paint self-portraits’ (A. Oehlen, quoted in R. Goetz, ’Self Portait with Open Mouth: New Conversations about Painting’, in Albert Oehlen: Self Portraits, exh. cat., Skarstedt Fine Art, New York, 2001-2002, pp. 48 and 70).