Albert Oehlen

Gagosian Gallery, New York

Acquired from the above by the present owner in 2013

Vienna, Museum moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig Wien, Albert Oehlen: Painting, June - October 2013, p. 153, illustrated in colour 

Colour: The colour in the catalogue illustration is fairly accurate. Condition: This work is in very good condition. There are creases throughout, which are original and integral to the artist's working process. Very close inspection reveals a few media accretions and some handling marks to the extreme overturn edges and corner tips. Extremely close inspection reveals some fine craquelure, most notably to the white, red and black pigment in the centre of the composition, which looks to be a result of the artist's choice of medium.
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Included in the critically acclaimed retrospective at mumok in Vienna in 2013, I 28 is a key recent work by Albert Oehlen. The present work is a post-Pop collage rendered in a world far the cubist streets of Montmartre or the Dada happenings in Berlin, where collage first took hold at the turn of the twentieth century. This is collage in a world where the computer has supplanted the newspaper, where manifestos have been replaced by consumerism, where depth has succumbed to flatness, where Photoshop rules. It is collage 2.0, filtered through a decidedly Warholian lens.

Indeed, the art historical reference points that Oehlen works with are especially rich in this body of work - drawing on Oehlen’s early German compatriors, Hannah Höch and Kurt Schwitters, they take in Matisse’s iconic cut outs as much as they obliquely reference the layered effects of Richter’s squeegee paintings. Yet in all this, it is Warhol that shines through as Oehlen’s main artistic conspirator. Much has been written on the influence of Pop art on Oehlen, Kippenberger and their German forefathers, Sigmar Polke and Gerhard Richter, yet throughout the work of the German school it remains an undercurrent, a conceptual underpinning. By placing it centre stage with all its vulgar aggression, replete with sale discounts, models and logos, Oehlen proudly releases it from the shadows of German art. 

I 28 marks the culmination of a seminal body of work that had its genesis in the Computer Paintings started by Oehlen in the early 1990s. At the  forefront of this two-decade-long enquiry was an interest in the intersection between technology and painting. For Oehlen, it was quest to resurrect the canvas in a digital age. Born out of the digital aesthetic of the Computer Paintings, these works are also a distillation of an intermediary body of work that Oehlen first showed at Thomas Dane Gallery in 2008. Meshed advertising imagery with his trademark overpainting, Oehlen noted before that show that he “wanted to do something with advertising images, which was the start of the whole project, but failed” (Albert Oehlen cited in: Press Release, London, Thomas Dane Gallery, Albert Oehlen, 29 February 2008, online). If Oehlen viewed his 2008 show as a successful failure, these collages must be viewed as triumph in their realisation of his previous aims.

In I 28, Oehlen has finally freed collage from the constraints of paint found in his earlier work, instead focusing on the layering, and formal aspects of pure collage. It is collage at its most painterly and figuration at its most abstract. It is collage resurrected for the digital age.