ALBERT OEHLEN | Untitled

Galerie Max Hetzler, Cologne Acquired from the above by the present owner circa 1985

Colour: The colours in the catalogue illustration are fairly accurate, although the red and yellow are brighter in the original. Condition: Please refer to the department for a professional condition report.
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Untitled is a significant work from the very earliest part of Albert Oehlen’s career. It stems from his Farbenlehre (Colour Theory) series – a body of work instigated in 1984 in the lead up to significant solo exhibitions at Gallerie Ascan Crone in Hamburg in 1985, and Galerie Max Hetzler in Cologne in 1986. The works are reactive and rebellious; fizzing with conceptual conceit and executed with trademark dissidence. At this stage of his career, Oehlen was one of the predominant Enfant Terribles of the Cologne art world. Along with other artists like Markus Oehlen (Albert’s brother), Werner Buttner, Jorg Immendorff, and particularly Martin Kippenberger, he engaged in a violent backlash against the art world status quo. Oehlen was a painter who seized upon the genre at a time when Minimalism and Conceptualism had declared it dead. His works were deliberately rebellious; deliberately ‘bad’ according to accepted principles of artistic beauty. He consciously identified with art-historical precedent, in order to intentionally defile it. As such, he turned to self-portraiture, parodying art-historical tropes of including mirror-like reflections in paintings by pasting physical mirrors directly onto his canvases, and satirising the idealising tendencies of the Old Masters by showing himself in comical disarray, disfigured, dishevelled, and warped almost beyond recognition. Likewise in the Farbenlehre, Oehlen took on the art historical weight associated to the primary colours: “In 1984, he introduced the three primary colours, blue, red, and yellow, as if the point were to think back to Mondrian” (Daniel Baumann, ‘Portrait Albert Oehlen: Source Code and Stress test’, Spike Art Magazine, Summer 2015, online). Up until this point in his career, Oehlen worked almost exclusively in the kind of muddy browns and deep greys that formulate the expressive background of the present work. In this context, the introduction of red, yellow, and blue, feels deeply sardonic and intentionally arbitrary. The colours are isolated into individual boxes that appear squat and drab. Oehlen separates them and shows them in dowdy flatness, teasing their potential to create the most vivid and varied palette imaginable, and intentionally overawing them with the majesty of his muddy abstraction behind.

That these boxes of colour are separated so consciously is significant, and the mood of separation that they engender is exacerbated through the inclusion of two found objects pasted upon the canvas: the sort of labels one would find marking a desk or office space, but inscribed to read ‘Freiheit – Freedom’ and ‘Grenze’ meaning border. The labels appear far too mundane and quotidian to deal with such broad and important concepts as borders and freedom; concepts that were at the forefront of the collective consciousness of 1980s Germany, which was still separated into East and West. Indeed, the arrangement of the boxes in this particular example of the Farbenlehre is almost reminiscent of the Berlin Wall, punctuated by its various checkpoints. With these labels, it is almost as if Oehlen equates the artistic practitioners of the previous generation with their political counterparts; as if those same people who were so taken by abstract paintings in primary colours, were also the masterminds of the Berlin wall. He deliberately fails to do justice to such an important and emotive topic, and furthers the deeply inflammatory sense of artistic disruption at this work’s core.

The found labels add to the sense of seditious mockery that pervades this work, and directly identify the present work with Kippenberger, who used labels of exactly the same type in his works of this period. Oehlen and Kippenberger were partners in crime throughout the 1980s and beyond; they were hugely influenced by Punk music and at pains to violently assert their role within the discourse. As Oehlen later recalled about this time: “We made asses of ourselves and made everyone hate us. We climbed on tables and pulled down our pants – extreme artist behaviour” (Albert Oehlen cited in: Raphael Rubinstein, ‘The Accidental Abstractionist, Art in America, June / July 2015, p. 90). The present work distils the insubordinate essence of this painterly position and bristles with the mutinous concepts of Oehlen’s style.