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The latest installment of Portraits for Blank Forms is Sun Ra, a limited-edition lithograph by the German artist Albert Oehlen. The second of five portraits by five different artists to be released by Blank Forms over a two-year period, Sun Ra depicts the jazz composer, pianist, bandleader, poet, and philosopher Sun Ra (1914–1993).

Blank Forms has the full run of fifty prints available, each of which measures 22" × 29" and will be priced starting at $1,500. Produced at the historic EFA Robert Blackburn Printmaking Workshop, Sun Ra is signed, dated, and numbered by the artist.

Albert Oehlen first came to prominence as a painter in Cologne and Berlin in the early 1980s. Together with his peers Martin Kippenberger, Werner Büttner, and brother Markus Oehlen, he was variously associated with the Neue Wilde scene and purposeful forays into “bad painting.” In the realm of music, he is best known for contributions to the Red Krayola, which began in 1989 with the album Malefactor, Ade, though his musical collaborations with Kippenberger and others date from the start of his career.

Today Oehlen is one of Germany’s most celebrated artists and among the preeminent painters of our era. From 2000–2009 he was Professor of Painting at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf, and he is portrayed with eye-popping abandon by the actor Ben Becker in the 2021 feature film The Painter (dir. Oliver Hirschbiegel). Sun Ra extends Oehlen’s long-held appreciation of Sun Ra, most recently manifested in his co-curation, with John Corbett, of the 2024 exhibition “Nothing Is: Sun Ra and Others’ Covers” (JUBG, Corbett vs. Dempsey), in which dozens of artists imagined previously unreleased album covers for Sun Ra.

​​Blank Forms supports artists and musicians who work across disciplines rooted in traditions of experimental and creative music. We organize concerts and exhibitions, build archives and estates, and publish books and records that bolster the critical and historical contexts of under-recognized artists and histories. From the start, support for Blank Forms’s programs has been driven primarily by the artists in our community, who help us platform complex, unruly, and ephemeral practices. Proceeds from all sales directly fund future performances, publications, and archival initiatives.