Peter Schjeldahl reviews Albert Oehlen: Home and Garden at the New Museum, New York, on view through September 13, 2015.

Schjeldahl notes: "There is as much philosophical heft to what [Oehlen] won’t allow himself, in the ways of order and balance, as in the stuttering virtuosities of what he does. His pictures possess no unity of composition, only unremitting energy. Everywhere your eye goes, it finds things to engage it; they just don’t add up. There are stabs of beauty in passages that reveal Oehlen to be, almost grudgingly, a fantastic colorist … If Oehlen has a method, it is to recoil, stroke by stroke, from conventional elegance—strangling one aborning stylistic grace after another."