herbert oehm. entropy and order

Using a non-representational visual language, he transforms his canvases into scenes of a fascinating experiment in exact form and random composition. On the occasion of his 90th birthday, kunsthalle weishaupt is dedicating a retrospective solo exhibition to the Ulm-based ZERO artist. For the first time and on the largest scale to date, the exhibition presents around 50 works by Herbert Oehm from the Weishaupt Collection, the herbert oehm archive and never-before-exhibited loans from private collections.

Oehm's pictures challenge the viewer. They offer the eye fluttering, shiny gold leaves, grid-like arrangements made of toilet paper, drop structures made of polyester resin and precisely painted colour gradients with a spatial effect: a pictorial world full of the most diverse materials, through which the artist gives form to reflections on concepts such as order and entropy. Deeply characterised by a rational world of thought that revolves around the understanding of general world processes and the structure of human thought, Oehm's works are to be understood as a means of communicating such phenomena. The artistic aspect is initially secondary. It is not about 'pure eye candy'. According to Oehm, his art is 'the artificially produced, the generated, communication of information'.