Albert Oehlen

Galerie Max Hetzler, Berlin
Skarstedt Gallery, New York
Acquired directly from the above by the present owner

Colour: The colours in the catalogue illustration are fairly accurate. Condition: This work is in very good condition. No restoration is apparent when examined under ultraviolet light.
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“At first one sees only a chaos of colors; then it begins to assume a likeness, but no: it resembles nothing. All at once a point defines itself, like the nucleus of a cell; it grows, the colors group themselves around it and accumulate; rays develop which sprout branches and twigs as ice crystals do on a window-pane... and the image presents itself to the viewer, who has assisted at the birth of the picture. And, what is even better, the painting remains always new, it changes according to the light, never wears out, and is endowed with the gift of life” (Exhibition Catalogue, Lausanne, Musée cantonal des Beaux-Arts de Lausanne, Albert Oehlen: Paintings 1980-2004, 2002, p. 86).

Executed in 2003, Albert Oehlen’s enigmatic Idol II is a masterful display of the artist’s complex and multi-layered practice, in which paintings such as the present one exhibit a profound exploration of the relation between abstraction and figuration. Suspended in a spatial composition that suggests three-dimensionality, the various abstract languages that are expressed at the centre of the composition constitute a powerful display of Oehlen’s signature fusion of sources and styles.

Having studied with Sigmar Polke in Hamburg, Oehlen has often been connected with a generation of German painters under the title Neue Wilde – an association that he has explicitly rejected. Instead of the neo-expressionist aesthetics of the 1980s, Oehlen favoured a more conceptual approach to painting closer to the work of his friend Martin Kippenberger. Like the latter, he had a strong interest in the notion of failure, which he explored in his intentionally ‘bad’ paintings of the 1980s. Since then he has elaborated on a wide spectrum of painterly strategies, ranging from computer-generated images to the appropriation of advertising. His genre-defying amalgamation of sources and aesthetics has in itself become a stylistic attribute, and this unique approach to painting sets Oehlen’s work apart from his contemporaries.

In contrast to many of the artist’s earlier paintings, Idol II is instilled with a calmness of composition and colour, emphasising his painterly skills over his conceptual concerns. With many anthropomorphic and figurative allusions in an otherwise entirely abstract composition, the painting reveals the fine line between abstraction and figuration through the associative nature of Oehlen’s formal language. A commanding work in both skill and visual power, Idol II encapsulates the artist’s extraordinary formal language that has redefined notions of taste and aesthetics in contemporary painting.