UDO KIER (RIGHT) IN BAD PAINTER

ALBERT OEHLEN: BAD PAINTER (2025) - BERLIN & BEYOND 2026

An artist's surreal, playful self-portrait

This film isn't in German but mostly in English, but it's about, sort of, the 71-year-old German artist Albert Oehlen, who's played, sort of, by the late German film actor Udo Kier, then 81. Albert Oehlen, also the director of this film, is one of those highly successful international artists, rolling in dough from the look of it, whom we've never heard of. He's school of Cologne, born in the Fifties and therefore somewhat indebted to Gerhard Richter, but he's also associated with Germany's Neue Wilde movement. His work consists of mid-sized bulbous sculptures and, more frequently, of mid-sized semi-abstract paintings. Imagine what it would be like if Jackson Pollock had a bad marriage with Francis Bacon and Picasso came in to put a flesh-colored figurative touch at the end.

You won't acquire that information about Oehlen's painting from this film, however, which doesn't highlight his work but rather uses Kier to muse in general about what being an artist means and what the process of painting is like. It uses a riff off Dali and Buñuel's Un chien andalu's eye-gouging at the outset to establish the filmmaker as a tongue-in-cheek provocateur. The film has a hard time maintaining a consistent tone thereafter, alternating so often as it does between the pompous and the playful. In the opening sequence several voices overlap, (Kier's with that of Kim Gordon) musing about painting while Kier dabs color on a canvas with brushes. "Painting is hard," muses Oehlen/Kier; "that's why they call it PAIN - TING." Very clever.

The painting Kier is making looks dreadful at first, the overlapping musings interfere with each other and don't make much sense, and the first quarter hour of the film go quite badly. But as the film and Kier's monologue settle in and the painting he's working on becomes more layered - perhaps with help from the unseen hand of Oehlen himself - both the painting and the film acquire greater complexity and what Oehlen is saying starts to seem more helpful, perhaps even, for some, enlightening, although having an aging actor pretend to make a painting still seems like a bad idea. Does "Bad Painter" really mean "Bad Filmmaker"? As an artist myself I am sympathetic to Oehlen's effort, but disappointed by the result. Though the Kier/Oehlen painting doesn't acquire the fluidity and transparency of Oehlen's own actual current paintings, it might eventually seem like, say, a bad De Kooning.

When we think of making an abstract painting with brushstrokes De Kooning does come to mind, and again I think of the "______ Paints a Picture" series in in the leading Fifties art magazine, Art News and the feature on "Willem de Kooning Paints a Picture, " important since de Kooning was the leading Action Painter in the dominant era of Action Painting and Action Painting is a school focused on process. Any painter's work is an evolving process, even that of Ivan Le Loraine Albright (anoher subject of an Art News "_____ Paints a Picture" article) . But in Action Painting, the process is the key element of the work. And Oehlen seems to be alluding to that here.

But that isn't a conscious focus here. At moments the film turns surreal, with the Oehlen/Kier artist seeming to pull a middle-aged woman out of oblivion as if to reanimate her (is she an ex-wife? the ghost of his mother?), and with a younger women he takes out to dinner at a fancy Italian restaurant where he orders the "pasta con tartufo." Later, as he wanders around his handsome modern house, Oehlen/Kier is annoyed by a poorly trained small bulldog roaming the premises, and resolves the problem by shooting and killing the poor creature. We are spared the sight of this provocation, but in the next scene Oehlen/Kier wonders aloud if he shouldn't also kill his other dog. He has also driven to the home of an artist friend and slapped him across the face. The woman with him questions this but he justifies it by saying that "art is violent." All this, somewhat in the spirit of early Yorgos Lanthimos, doubtless grows out of the fact that besides being a painter, Oehlen is also an installation artist. The artist-painter here doesn't emerge as a sympathetic humanist but an egotist, showing off with pride a finished painting and drinking toast to it, making fun of himself. Badf Painter can be seen as a sort of self-roast.

At one point Oehlen/Kier meets with another prolific artist, the restaurant chain founder Michael Chow (Mr. CHow), who studied in London at St. Martin's School of Art, and whose paintings are light and airy abstractions he describes making with large pieces of crumpled paper and different sized hammers. Later, We see Oehlen/Kier quite drunk and he is warned not to try to paint in such a state. Finally Oehlen/Kier is dead - before that, blind, wandering onto a tennis court, unable to paint - and a small group of conoscenti, shown by a handsome ginger-bearded man the now deceased Oehlen's "final thesis," writhe on the floor groaning, while his female inner voice goes on musing.

This is one of three films by artist Albert Oehlen, including an earlier one from 2024 called Yellow (a color he seems to have special feelings about) and a later one from 2026 called The End and featuring the glamorous Nichole Galicia, who played Sheba in Quentin Tarantino's 2012 Django Unchained. Kier is seen brandishing a photo of Galicia in Bad Painter. Before these films there was a 2021 documentary by Oliver Hirschbiegel called Der Maler (The Painter) described as "A one man tour de force depicting artist Albert Oehlen struggling with a painting." So it would seem that Oehlen has gotten his "______ Paints a Picture." (Hirschbiegel made the 2004 film about the end of Hitler, Downfall.)

This wasn't Udo Kier's last film: there are several others as well as TV episodes in post-production. Last year he had a small role in Kleber Mendonça Filho's The Secret Agent.

Bad Painter, 80 mins., premiered at Rotterdam Feb. 3, 2025. US showing Jan. 9, 2026 at Palm Springs. It was screened for this review as part of Berlin & Beyond (San Francisco & Berkeley, Calif., Mar. 19-23, 2026). Showtime:
Showtime: SFMOMA’s Phyllis Wattis Theater – March 21 at 3:30 PM – Buy Tickets

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©Chris Knipp. Blog: http://chrisknipp.blogspot.com/.