Tramonto Spaventoso

Tramonto Spaventoso is the book made for Albert Oehlen's 2021 exhibition at Gagosian in Beverly Hills, where he reworked a painting by John Graham on a very large scale.

The show ran from April 22 to June 5, 2021. It took its title from Graham's Tramonto Spaventoso (Terrifying Sunset, 1940–49), which Oehlen borrows from and remixes. Four new monumental paintings in charcoal, acrylic and fabric completed his version of the Rothko Chapel in Houston, the first part of which was shown at the Serpentine Galleries in London in 2019–20. The book is a companion to the Serpentine catalogue. It is a 40-page unbound softcover in a dust jacket, with full-bleed reproductions, a foldout poster and a clear acetate cover carrying a silkscreened drawing by Oehlen. It also prints a conversation between Oehlen and the curator Mark Godfrey, "Graham Rothko Shreds," on the Rothko Chapel, Graham, Leigh Bowery and painting.

Gagosian describes Oehlen as using abstract, figurative and collaged elements to break down the conventions of modern painting, and as a champion of self-consciously amateurish painting. He found Graham's picture in the 1990s. Graham was a Russian-born American modernist, and the exhibition is partly a homage to him.