carlier | gebauer is pleased to announce The Spiral of Painting, an encounter-exhibition with three touchstones of contemporary painting: Julie Mehretu (1970, Ethiopa), Albert Oehlen (1954, Germany), Luis Gordillo (1934, Spain).

This intergenerational dialogue begins with Gordillo, a pioneer of multi-media painting who paved the way for subsequent developments that Oehlen, and later Mehretu, brought to the realm of painting.

“Painting runs through everything: it has always unfolded and manifested itself by establishing a dialogue with all forms of experience and representation. What best identifies it is the form of the spiral, a line that circles around a point, and in doing so moves away from that point. The spiral of painting, through its dynamism, activates its artistic presence in its variety and its echoes, through time and through the different spaces of life and action.

This synthesis of the spiral is a central and convergent feature in three great painters. With all the nuances and differences in the work of each of them, we can find a common nexus of dialogue, which has to do with the use of diverse expressive techniques: photography, performance, video and digital supports, with which the pictorial expression is open and plural, in a profound and continuous contrast with what life and experience tell us.

This is how painting remains in time. In the works of the three artists, with different modulations, we see the play of lines, planes, and colours, always with an open representation in their forms and in the various spheres of meaning, which converge in a desire for a profound interrogation of what we see and what we feel, of the experience of life beyond the merely immediate… Mehretu, Oehlen, Gordillo: on entering their works we come to see in the spiral mirror that painting is part of our bodies and our minds, of the questions about who we are and where we are going.” – José Jiménez, 2024.