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Lot Essay
'I have always liked the method. I don't have theories; maybe that word is wrong, but I call it method, the method of painting. I thought, what were the instructions that for instance Pollock had, or Franz Kline, or the Surrealists when they made the automatic drawings. I came up with all these ideas of what it is... is it composition? Is it aggression? Is it gesture? Is it some kind of spirit? Alcohol?!'
(A. Oehlen quoted in A. Tarsia, 'In Conversation: Albert Oehlen with Andrea Tarsia', pp. I-IV, A. Tarsia & M. Clark (ed.), Albert Oehlen: I Will Always Champion Good Painting, exh. cat., London, 2006, p. II).
Standing over two metres tall, the two panels of Albert Oehlen's Uurhyolth 11-13 present the viewer with an explosion of pictorial activity. Lines zig, zag and curve across the canvas in frenetic scribbles that mockingly recall the drips of the Abstract Expressionist artist Jackson Pollock while the background features a range of effects echoing the legacies of Op Art and perhaps even Art Deco. Oehlen has created a seemingly demented palimpsest of exploded imagery, with forms and shapes colliding, overwriting each other, here blurring like one of Gerhard Richter's Photo Paintings and there bursting forth from the vast surface with expressive force. A receding tunnel of grey squares in the right-hand panel gives both the sense of an optical illusion, plunging to a fictive perspectival depth, and also recalls Frank Stella's groundbreaking works which emphasised their own two-dimensionality. At the same time, Oehlen has created Uurhyolth 11-13 in a way that forces the viewer to acknowledge the fact that the inkjet-printed imagery that underpins the composition, over which he has painted in oils, acrylics and enamels, is visibly, emphatically based on abstract forms that he could create using a computer, with Photoshop as his studio collaborator.
Oehlen has been one of the highest-profile figures in contemporary painting. In his works from the late 1990s and early 2000s in particular, he has revealed the extent to which he had one foot in the Punk era and the other in the digital. Both of these aspects are in evidence in Uurhyolth 11-13, which has clearly been created both using a computer and with subsequent bursts of energetic application. This diptych's swirling forms and its deliberate mangle of imagery recall, in terms of technique and sheer energy, the iconoclastic works of Oehlen's friend and artistic collaborator, Martin Kippenberger. Oehlen has embarked upon a similar frenetic, irreverent intellectual assault on the precepts of art as those championed by Kippenberger, who had died only four years earlier. Both artists carried out assaults on aesthetics, and also on the hierarchies and structures that underpin so much of the art world and art market.
The backdrop upon which Oehlen has worked is a form of abstract collage created using software, mouse and screen. In this sense, it is a clear development from Oehlen's earlier paintings which used computer imagery as their base. Those pictures, created on the Texas Instruments computer he acquired in 1990, often showed meandering black-and-white compositions; in them, Oehlen initially revelled in the fact that, when he blew the images up onto canvases over two metres tall, the miniature movements he had been able to make using his mouse were magnified in a way that would have been nigh on impossible working with brush and oils; at the same time, he was also aware of the fallibility of the computer-generated imagery on that scale, as with his early software, the pixels showed all too openly on the canvas, each one becoming a square of significant size.
Those squares had provided Oehlen with a system, a means of continuing to paint. He looked at the squared edges that made up, say, a curve on the original image on the screen, and decided to rectify them. This developed into an entire method, whereby he reacts to the situation that he has essentially inherited from the design he created on the computer, itself often incorporating the results of almost random gestures. In this way, Oehlen throws the entire methodology of painting, and of image-making, to the fore, challenging traditional boundaries of authorship, associations with the artist's hand and the painterly mark, while creating an abstract image that nonetheless parodies the works of the Action Painters.
In Uurhyolth 11-13, Oehlen appears to have renounced the black-and-white templates which he created on that computer in 1990 and has often used since; instead, this picture contains a number of areas that hint at the use of various actions and techniques that are of a more advanced nature. However, he has left the background largely white, pushing the often acid colours to the forefront.
In this sense, in the rigorous methodology and in the gradual build-up of layers of marks that have accumulated on the surface, Uurhyolth 11-13 finds its true cousin in the painstakingly-created Abstract Pictures of Gerhard Richter, assembled over long stretches of time in such a manner that they avoid figuration or reference. Oehlen appears to have co-opted Richter's love of colour and of paint and his questioning of the nature of image-making, yet to have pushed it to a new, deliberately absurd extreme. In this way, he has carried on a strong tradition in German post-war art of pushing back the boundaries, taking on the mantle of Joseph Beuys, Kippenberger, Richter, and of his own teacher from his time as an art student in Hamburg, Sigmar Polke. Indeed, it appears to be no coincidence that Uurhyolth 11-13, with its layers of application and imagery, recalls the semi-transparent paintings of Polke. Likewise, it is a tribute to Oehlen's bold vision that the year before Uurhyolth 11-13 was created, he was appointed a professor of art at the Kunstakademie in Dusseldorf.
(A. Oehlen quoted in A. Tarsia, 'In Conversation: Albert Oehlen with Andrea Tarsia', pp. I-IV, A. Tarsia & M. Clark (ed.), Albert Oehlen: I Will Always Champion Good Painting, exh. cat., London, 2006, p. II).
Standing over two metres tall, the two panels of Albert Oehlen's Uurhyolth 11-13 present the viewer with an explosion of pictorial activity. Lines zig, zag and curve across the canvas in frenetic scribbles that mockingly recall the drips of the Abstract Expressionist artist Jackson Pollock while the background features a range of effects echoing the legacies of Op Art and perhaps even Art Deco. Oehlen has created a seemingly demented palimpsest of exploded imagery, with forms and shapes colliding, overwriting each other, here blurring like one of Gerhard Richter's Photo Paintings and there bursting forth from the vast surface with expressive force. A receding tunnel of grey squares in the right-hand panel gives both the sense of an optical illusion, plunging to a fictive perspectival depth, and also recalls Frank Stella's groundbreaking works which emphasised their own two-dimensionality. At the same time, Oehlen has created Uurhyolth 11-13 in a way that forces the viewer to acknowledge the fact that the inkjet-printed imagery that underpins the composition, over which he has painted in oils, acrylics and enamels, is visibly, emphatically based on abstract forms that he could create using a computer, with Photoshop as his studio collaborator.
Oehlen has been one of the highest-profile figures in contemporary painting. In his works from the late 1990s and early 2000s in particular, he has revealed the extent to which he had one foot in the Punk era and the other in the digital. Both of these aspects are in evidence in Uurhyolth 11-13, which has clearly been created both using a computer and with subsequent bursts of energetic application. This diptych's swirling forms and its deliberate mangle of imagery recall, in terms of technique and sheer energy, the iconoclastic works of Oehlen's friend and artistic collaborator, Martin Kippenberger. Oehlen has embarked upon a similar frenetic, irreverent intellectual assault on the precepts of art as those championed by Kippenberger, who had died only four years earlier. Both artists carried out assaults on aesthetics, and also on the hierarchies and structures that underpin so much of the art world and art market.
The backdrop upon which Oehlen has worked is a form of abstract collage created using software, mouse and screen. In this sense, it is a clear development from Oehlen's earlier paintings which used computer imagery as their base. Those pictures, created on the Texas Instruments computer he acquired in 1990, often showed meandering black-and-white compositions; in them, Oehlen initially revelled in the fact that, when he blew the images up onto canvases over two metres tall, the miniature movements he had been able to make using his mouse were magnified in a way that would have been nigh on impossible working with brush and oils; at the same time, he was also aware of the fallibility of the computer-generated imagery on that scale, as with his early software, the pixels showed all too openly on the canvas, each one becoming a square of significant size.
Those squares had provided Oehlen with a system, a means of continuing to paint. He looked at the squared edges that made up, say, a curve on the original image on the screen, and decided to rectify them. This developed into an entire method, whereby he reacts to the situation that he has essentially inherited from the design he created on the computer, itself often incorporating the results of almost random gestures. In this way, Oehlen throws the entire methodology of painting, and of image-making, to the fore, challenging traditional boundaries of authorship, associations with the artist's hand and the painterly mark, while creating an abstract image that nonetheless parodies the works of the Action Painters.
In Uurhyolth 11-13, Oehlen appears to have renounced the black-and-white templates which he created on that computer in 1990 and has often used since; instead, this picture contains a number of areas that hint at the use of various actions and techniques that are of a more advanced nature. However, he has left the background largely white, pushing the often acid colours to the forefront.
In this sense, in the rigorous methodology and in the gradual build-up of layers of marks that have accumulated on the surface, Uurhyolth 11-13 finds its true cousin in the painstakingly-created Abstract Pictures of Gerhard Richter, assembled over long stretches of time in such a manner that they avoid figuration or reference. Oehlen appears to have co-opted Richter's love of colour and of paint and his questioning of the nature of image-making, yet to have pushed it to a new, deliberately absurd extreme. In this way, he has carried on a strong tradition in German post-war art of pushing back the boundaries, taking on the mantle of Joseph Beuys, Kippenberger, Richter, and of his own teacher from his time as an art student in Hamburg, Sigmar Polke. Indeed, it appears to be no coincidence that Uurhyolth 11-13, with its layers of application and imagery, recalls the semi-transparent paintings of Polke. Likewise, it is a tribute to Oehlen's bold vision that the year before Uurhyolth 11-13 was created, he was appointed a professor of art at the Kunstakademie in Dusseldorf.