Albert Oehlen, alongside artists like Martin Kippenberger, came to prominence as part of Hamburg's prodigious art and music scene in the 1980s. In the late ‘80s, he began to challenge the expectations of conventional abstract art in works he deemed "post-non-figurative." Focusing on the process of painting, Oehlen's work is marked by constraints he sets for himself, such as using only certain colors, integrating mirrors into his canvases, working collaboratively (notably with Jonathan Meese), and employing computers to generate designs. He studied with Sigmar Polke and was also influenced by Georg Baselitz, Gerhard Richter, and Willem de Kooning.