Albert Oehlen/Peppi Bottrop: Line packers”

The Marciano Art Foundation presents Line Packers”, a special exhibition, conceived by Cornelius Tittel, of two German painters Peppi Bottrop (b. 1986, Bottrop) and Albert Oehlen (b. 1954, Krefeld). The foundation’s Lounge Gallery will feature Bottrop’s line-drawing paintings responding to the architecture of the Lounge Gallery itself alongside works from Oehlen’s Computer Paintings, a series that the artist began in the early 1990s, which is now regarded as a turning point for contemporary painting.

Bottrop’s work is conceived as a meditation on his hometown, a once prominent coal mining and rail center in the Ruhr region. Bottrop employs charcoal—a metaphor for what once powered the world, and a nod to the now-defunct mechanical industry—in an expansive wall-drawing engraved into slabs of Fermacell, a material now replacing sheetrock or gypsum used in the construction of institutional architecture.

Oehlen’s Computer Paintings, which will be affixed to Bottrop’s walls, made between 1992 and 2008, exemplify Oehlen’s pioneering role as one of the first contemporary painters to explore the nascent capabilities and limits of drawing and line-making through the use of a now-rudimentary Texas Instruments computer. The wall-drawings and supports by Bottrop juxtaposed with Oehlen’s Computer Paintings suggest new possibilities for the line in painting. This line, embedded materially into the Fermacell walls, offers a proposition for the medium of painting to re-define itself. The two autonomous, yet mutually-dependent works establish a place of intensive communication and self-exploration, supporting one another in this single, temporary unification that looks to Wilshire Blvd. and Los Angeles, a city that is just as easily defined by its own lines of interstate and highway infrastructure.