Fiction, documentary, filmed performance? Actor Ben Becker plays Albert Oehlen, an artist creating a painting. The film crosses formal boundaries and questions the meaning of the creative process and the struggle for authenticity at different levels. As the painter himself says, ‘Art must show its internal process of creation, like a stripped-down, totally visible mechanism, and must not be the artist’s field of sensitive expression’. Albert Oehlen’s (born 1954) work, linked to neo-Expressionism, draws on conceptual gestures and logic. It is rooted in the punk movement and German left-wing ideology of the 1970s; the artist constantly questions the authoritarian and dominant nature of painting, attempting to free it from its historical obligations and references. The result is a body of experimental work that grapples with the many ideological and formal crises of the contemporary age.