Albert Oehlen

Since 1988, following a year during which he shared a house with Martin Kippenberger in Andalusia, Albert Oehlen has been painting what he terms “Procrustean paintings”. Just as Procrustes, the mythical Greek giant stretched or shortened captives to make them fit his beds, so Oehlen takes bright colours and dull colours, expensive pigments and cheap pigments, spray paint and oil, Kandinsky’s colour theory and Basquiat’s graffiti art and stretches, moulds and breaks them to form one painting. Oehlen’s art breaks boundaries, challenging the validity, values and also the pomposity of his predecessors and contemporaries. For Oehlen, painting has ironically become pointless; he maintains that the only possibility left for painting is failure. He engages with art, history and politics in a provocative, confrontational way, fully justifying the title of his 1997 show at the Kunstahalle in Basel – Albert vs. History.

By using the traditional techniques and forms of abstract painting, Oehlen undermines it. He takes powerful colour stimuli - including, as in the present work, the yellow and blue combination favoured by suicidal people, camouflage, bright pinks and muddy browns - and emasculates them. They become not only non-representational but also non-expressionist. Oehlen in his “post-non-representational pictures” ironically achieves beauty by exposing the poverty of visual language. Whatever elements he brings into the painting just adds to the anarchy of the whole. This is especially true of the figurative elements that seem to lurk, hidden beneath mists of colour. In these instances, Oehlen concerns himself with form as a test of courage: “The test of courage is to trust yourself to have a dark blue surface, and then to paint a yellow crescent in the upper left-hand corner without its becoming a moon.” (the artist in conversation with André Butzer cited in: Exh. Cat., Zurich, Thomas Ammann Fine Art, 2005, p. 18)

Thus, Oehlen bombards the viewer with a barrage of colours and forms subverting painting through painting, a picture full of sound and fury, purposefully signifying nothing. Layers and layers of paint, colour and computer generation confuse the viewer, leading one to rock back and forth in front of the image unable to rest one’s gaze. This is an extraordinary painting, both ideologically dangerous and visually stimulating.