Albert Oehlen

Galerie Max Hetzler, Berlin

The colours in the catalogue illustration are fairly accurate, although the overall tonality is slightly brighter and more vibrant and the illustration does not fully convey the reflective quality of the silver paint in the bottom half of the painting. This work is in very good condition. Close inspection reveals minute hairline cracks at intervals to the extreme overturn edges, inherent to the nature of the medium, a circular indentation towards the centre of the top edge, a very minor and stable curved hairline crack towards the centre of the left edge. No restoration is apparent under ultraviolet light.
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"A lot of the things that Martin [Kippenberger] and I did were meant to encourage each other to try something crazier. Instead of working on a career or standing for a certain kind of painting, we tried something new every day" The artist cited in 'Albert Oehlen talks to Eric Banks' in Artforum, April 2003.

 

Painted in 1990 at a high point in his career, Untitled is one of Albert Oehlen's most comprehensive paintings made at the precise moment when he moved away from figurative elements towards a more abstract mode of painting. As the artist recalls at the end of the 1980s, "Martin [Kippenberger] and I were staying in a house in Spain for a year. It was meant to be a time to think and experiment and make something new... We were working like that for the whole year and testing things out on each other, to see if he reacts by smiling or looks bored" (The artist cited in 'Albert Oehlen talks to Eric Banks' in Artforum, April 2003). It was in Spain that Kippenberger started making his series of self portraits, today considered the apogee of his oeuvre; it was in the aftermath of the same potent creative atmosphere in Spain that Oehlen made some of the most comprehensive paintings of his career, including the present work.  

 

Oehlen and Kippenberger became friends in the late 1970s and together they shared exhibition spaces, publications and jointly conceived projects in Hamburg and Berlin. The relationship that developed between these two artists and their contribution to the evolution of painting is one of the most pivotal in the recent history of art. They both established themselves early on as important figures on the German avant-garde scene.  They frequented the Berlin punk club SO 36 which became a hotbed of creativity where artists could meet, hold concerts, put on exhibitions, and show underground films. They both participated in bands and it was this punk attitude, the notion that anyone can do it regardless of whether or not you could play a guitar or hold a tune, that informed their ideas about painting. While the 1980s artworld was dominated by the Italian Transavanguardia and the Neo-Expressionists in New York, Oehlen and Kippenberger forged their own independent paths. They were friends and peers more than forming a school of painting, but together they pushed the boundaries of their medium and produced some of the most important painting of the eighties and nineties.

 

Oehlen has always been an iconoclast, testing the limits of visual meaning and encouraging anti-authoritarian attitudes toward artistic expression. However, he was certain that painting should be the definitive visual arts medium and rejected Conceptual art and other critical approaches to art as too mechanical and institutionalised. The challenge for Oehlen was to revalidate painting. Partly inspired by punk rock and its relationship to more conventional rock music, its way of using and destroying a given code at the same time, he sought to find a way of adopting a critical vantage point from within the medium itself. As a student at the Hochschule für Bildende Kunst in Hamburg, he was influenced early by his tutor Sigmar Polke, whose mixing of registers, historical revisionism and systematic derangement of focus were all steering influences on his own evolving style. Also of seminal importance was an exhibition at New York's New Museum in 1978 called Bad Painting, which showcased the work of fourteen American painters who rejected traditional concepts of draftsmanship in order to present humorous often sardonic views of the world, blurring the boundaries between traditional notions of good and bad, beautiful and ugly. In 1980, Metro Pictures opened in New York with a new generation of appropriation artists, including Cindy Sherman, Richard Prince and Sherrie Levine, which heralded the more rigorous theoretical framework of post modernism together with the supposed demise of painting. It was in this vacuum that Oehlen and Kippenberger found their fertile creative ground, in which they found enormous stylistic freedom and a spirit of trying something new and pushing the boundaries of their chosen medium.

 

Starting without a preconceived idea of how the painting should look, in Untitled Oehlen focuses instead on the production process in a form of anti-aestheticism which he brands 'post-non-representationalism'. Combining the spirit of American appropriation art with the freedom engendered by punk, he pilfers images from high and low culture, the sacred and the profane, art history books and club fliers, and composes his chosen forms in oil paint on canvas in an aesthetic more akin to collage. These chaotic, random forms in bold colours are layered behind dripping layers pigment which obfuscate and deny figuration, perspective and pictorial space. In this cacophony of abstraction, it is the stuff of paint, the practice of painting itself which becomes the true subject of the painting. What results is a sort of metatextual criticism, because it is only through producing painting that Oehlen can adopt a critical position vis-a-vis painting while still insisting on its validity.