Albert Oehlen's Baumbilder (Tree Paintings) series is a manifestation of the artist's ongoing study of the abstract visual language. The tree image appeared in the Oehlen's work in the 1980s. Since then it has been a recurring subject in his art, a motif that he repeatedly re-defined and through which he re-examined the foundations of painting itself, expanding and constantly bending its boundaries.

"They are more simple and more complicated now," he says. "Qualities that I want to see brought together: delicacy and coarseness, color and vagueness, and, underlying them all, a base note of hysteria."