To take stock of the past year, Artforum asked an international group of artists to select a single exhibition or event that most memorably captured their eye in 2019. Andrej Dubravsky was one of the over 30 artists asked to participate in this fantastic article surveying what stood out from some of the worlds most important creators today.
Albert Oehlen (Skarstedt Gallery, New York)
This show gave me hope. I saw Oehlen’s exhibition the very day after I arrived in New York City from the Slovakian countryside. While walking the hot and overcrowded streets of the Upper East Side, eating pricey food, feeling sweaty and still jet-lagged, I wondered why I was there at all. Seeing this German painter’s monumental works, drawn from the “Fn” series of 1990, refreshed my mind. What are the fragments of human eye, or the hammer and sickle, about? Does it matter? Almost thirty years ago, the murky brown and yellow tones of these pieces rendered the whole debate about abstraction versus figuration ridiculous and pointless. The only relevant thing here is the fascination induced by the painting itself.