Selbstporträt. Mit leeren Händen documents four conversations between Albert Oehlen and Rainald Goetz conducted between 1994 and 1998. Published as Bulletin 23 of the Fama & Fortune series,

the volume offers a direct and unfiltered exchange on painting, authorship, self-representation, and the conditions of artistic production in the 1990s.

Rather than functioning as a conventional theoretical treatise, the book presents discourse as practice. The dialogue format foregrounds tension, contradiction, and immediacy. Oehlen reflects on strategies of negation, abstraction, provocation, and the deliberate destabilization of painterly conventions. Goetz, as interlocutor, introduces literary, cultural, and philosophical inflections that expand the discussion beyond studio practice.

The title, With Empty Hands, suggests both refusal and autonomy—painting positioned against expectation, market logic, and fixed identity. The publication stands as a key document of Oehlen’s intellectual positioning during a decisive period in contemporary German painting.