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Lot Essay
'If almost every major Oehlen is to some degree slung over the bones of a collage, it's also true that the painting itself is a collage of different moments and gestures, and that in many cases the moments we would call painterly are often followed and extended by further layers of actual collage... That is to say that the paintings never seem to depart of finally distinguish themselves from collage, or from the persistence of the readymade image, which has a way of returning as décor or content in an otherwise abstract picture'
(J. Kelsey, 'Collage and Program: Rise of the Readymetal Maidens', pp. 50-56, in Parkett, no. 79, May 2007, p. 51).
'I require of myself that my paintings be comprehensible... I'm interested in very simple things. In the last few years, I've been particularly concerned with evidence - with not seeing anything in the painting other than what's actually there. Nothing is codified -a mess is just a mess. I want an art where you see how it's made, not what the artist intended, or what the work means, but what has been made, the traces of production'
(A. Oehlen quoted in D. Diederichson, 'The Rules of the Game - Artist Albert Oehlen - Interview', in ArtForum, November 1994).
A churning maelstrom of colour, of fragmented imagery and of lines which zig and zag across the vast space of the canvas, Albert Oehlen's Aufräumen appears to have done the opposite of what its title implies: there has been little tidying up here, it seems. Instead, an incredibly dynamic palimpsest of abstract and figurative elements has been assembled, like a collage which has been submitted to various creative and indeed destructive processes. The blue, red, green and grey lines which dart hither and thither across the canvas recall scribbles, yet some of them have been applied not as direct gestures on the part of the artist, but instead as printed, computer-generated details. In Aufräumen, it is technique as much as content which has been juxtaposed, resulting in areas that are clearly the result of his own handiwork lying cheek by jowl with areas that have been printed from source images which have perhaps been scanned or even downloaded from the internet. In this way, Aufräumen presents the viewer with a deliberately chaotic image of information in flux, and indeed of an art world in flux.
Oehlen is one of the veterans of a generation of German iconoclasts who were propelled to the forefront of the avant garde towards the end of the 1970s. A student of Sigmar Polke, whose own deconstruction of painting and multi-layered images is echoed in Aufräumen, Oehlen embraced the sense of punk and anti-authoritarianism that he shared with his friend and fellow artist Martin Kippenberger, and focussed this into an all-out assault on art itself. Painted in 1998, Aufräumen shows the degree to which Oehlen has adapted increasingly contemporary techniques to this aim. Clearly, some of the areas of the picture have been created using computer programmes, not least the lines which streak so unpredictably across the surface. Oehlen was fascinated by the potential for computers within the realm of art and had bought a laptop as early as 1990 which he began to use to create frameworks and templates for his own pictures, gradually letting the computerised imagery take a more prominent role in compositions such as Aufräumen. Crucially, this use of graphics programmes in order to attain such a vivid final result revealed Oehlen's mocking criticism of the Neo-Expressionism that had come to be such a force in the avant garde in Germany, not least with the painters nick-named the Neue Wilde. In Aufräumen, Oehlen has created a picture which appears to have all the energy of those spirited painters, yet which is in fact a carefully-layered composition comprising mechanically-reproduced areas that are direct assaults on the exertions of the Neo-Expressionists.
Originally, Oehlen attempted to improve upon the images he made on his computer. He was fascinated by the idea that a swooping line created by pushing a mouse mere centimetres could artificially magnified and being printed on a vast surface such as Aufräumen, making its computer-generated origins all the more apparent. Oehlen would then set about 'correcting' his images, for instance smoothing out the pixellation that resulted from the increased scale of the original digital lines by means of painterly interventions. In this and similar ways, Oehlen developed a group of arbitrary and often nonsensical rules which would guide the development of his pictures, as he tried to 'correct' whatever he had created as a starting point. In Aufräumen, the notion of correction which was inspired by the early graphics from Oehlen's laptop is carried into the title, with its hint at cleanliness. With its smears of colour and its explosion of collaged imagery, Aufräumen is far from tidy. Instead, it is a destabilising screen fuelled by extreme sensory overload. A lion here, a pair of checked trousers on the legs of a man there, flowers, the patterned silhouette of a woman's legs and even an area of vigorous-seeming marks which appear to portray hair - these elements have been seemingly haphazardly assembled within this churning mass of colour. Near the centre is a crisp rectangle filled with softly blending colours which recalls Gerhard Richter's Abstracts and also the photographs of Thomas Ruff, allowing Oehlen to pay his questionable tribute to his contemporaries. That rectangle is one of the few areas in which a hint of 'tidiness' appears; another absurd example of Oehlen's correction is shown in the man's leg, which is extended and bent through ninety degrees in order to adopt the customary verticality of a standing figure, rather than the horizontality shown here.
Oehlen's inclusion of areas that appear to refer to Richter and Ruff introduces the complex tension between figuration and abstraction that has lain at the heart of much of the greatest art produced during the last half century. Oehlen himself has explained that his own move towards abstraction was intended to mirror the history of art itself, which he saw as drifting inexorably away from figuration. In Aufräumen, he has managed to include figurative elements, yet the overall effect is unquestionably abstract. Indeed, the artist has deliberately obfuscated and distorted the entire concept of art as a means of communication or representation, tapping into an iconography which he refers to as 'post-non-figurative': the recognisable elements included within this composition only serve to highlight the extent to which these visible entities mean little in their own rights. Instead, they are present as the proof of their own creation, as traces of the various methods and processes that have brought about their existence on the canvas. In this, and indeed in the deliberately illogical orientation of the canvas, Aufräumen takes a lesson from another German painter, Georg Baselitz, whose upside-down paintings are here surpassed. The arbitrary nature of Baselitz's inverted images finds its new incarnation in the frenzied, varied marks of Aufräumen. Here, Oehlen has deliberately barraged the viewer with a crazed cornucopia of devices, motifs and techniques and has thereby deconstructed the entire nature of picture-making, in terms of both process and content.
(J. Kelsey, 'Collage and Program: Rise of the Readymetal Maidens', pp. 50-56, in Parkett, no. 79, May 2007, p. 51).
'I require of myself that my paintings be comprehensible... I'm interested in very simple things. In the last few years, I've been particularly concerned with evidence - with not seeing anything in the painting other than what's actually there. Nothing is codified -a mess is just a mess. I want an art where you see how it's made, not what the artist intended, or what the work means, but what has been made, the traces of production'
(A. Oehlen quoted in D. Diederichson, 'The Rules of the Game - Artist Albert Oehlen - Interview', in ArtForum, November 1994).
A churning maelstrom of colour, of fragmented imagery and of lines which zig and zag across the vast space of the canvas, Albert Oehlen's Aufräumen appears to have done the opposite of what its title implies: there has been little tidying up here, it seems. Instead, an incredibly dynamic palimpsest of abstract and figurative elements has been assembled, like a collage which has been submitted to various creative and indeed destructive processes. The blue, red, green and grey lines which dart hither and thither across the canvas recall scribbles, yet some of them have been applied not as direct gestures on the part of the artist, but instead as printed, computer-generated details. In Aufräumen, it is technique as much as content which has been juxtaposed, resulting in areas that are clearly the result of his own handiwork lying cheek by jowl with areas that have been printed from source images which have perhaps been scanned or even downloaded from the internet. In this way, Aufräumen presents the viewer with a deliberately chaotic image of information in flux, and indeed of an art world in flux.
Oehlen is one of the veterans of a generation of German iconoclasts who were propelled to the forefront of the avant garde towards the end of the 1970s. A student of Sigmar Polke, whose own deconstruction of painting and multi-layered images is echoed in Aufräumen, Oehlen embraced the sense of punk and anti-authoritarianism that he shared with his friend and fellow artist Martin Kippenberger, and focussed this into an all-out assault on art itself. Painted in 1998, Aufräumen shows the degree to which Oehlen has adapted increasingly contemporary techniques to this aim. Clearly, some of the areas of the picture have been created using computer programmes, not least the lines which streak so unpredictably across the surface. Oehlen was fascinated by the potential for computers within the realm of art and had bought a laptop as early as 1990 which he began to use to create frameworks and templates for his own pictures, gradually letting the computerised imagery take a more prominent role in compositions such as Aufräumen. Crucially, this use of graphics programmes in order to attain such a vivid final result revealed Oehlen's mocking criticism of the Neo-Expressionism that had come to be such a force in the avant garde in Germany, not least with the painters nick-named the Neue Wilde. In Aufräumen, Oehlen has created a picture which appears to have all the energy of those spirited painters, yet which is in fact a carefully-layered composition comprising mechanically-reproduced areas that are direct assaults on the exertions of the Neo-Expressionists.
Originally, Oehlen attempted to improve upon the images he made on his computer. He was fascinated by the idea that a swooping line created by pushing a mouse mere centimetres could artificially magnified and being printed on a vast surface such as Aufräumen, making its computer-generated origins all the more apparent. Oehlen would then set about 'correcting' his images, for instance smoothing out the pixellation that resulted from the increased scale of the original digital lines by means of painterly interventions. In this and similar ways, Oehlen developed a group of arbitrary and often nonsensical rules which would guide the development of his pictures, as he tried to 'correct' whatever he had created as a starting point. In Aufräumen, the notion of correction which was inspired by the early graphics from Oehlen's laptop is carried into the title, with its hint at cleanliness. With its smears of colour and its explosion of collaged imagery, Aufräumen is far from tidy. Instead, it is a destabilising screen fuelled by extreme sensory overload. A lion here, a pair of checked trousers on the legs of a man there, flowers, the patterned silhouette of a woman's legs and even an area of vigorous-seeming marks which appear to portray hair - these elements have been seemingly haphazardly assembled within this churning mass of colour. Near the centre is a crisp rectangle filled with softly blending colours which recalls Gerhard Richter's Abstracts and also the photographs of Thomas Ruff, allowing Oehlen to pay his questionable tribute to his contemporaries. That rectangle is one of the few areas in which a hint of 'tidiness' appears; another absurd example of Oehlen's correction is shown in the man's leg, which is extended and bent through ninety degrees in order to adopt the customary verticality of a standing figure, rather than the horizontality shown here.
Oehlen's inclusion of areas that appear to refer to Richter and Ruff introduces the complex tension between figuration and abstraction that has lain at the heart of much of the greatest art produced during the last half century. Oehlen himself has explained that his own move towards abstraction was intended to mirror the history of art itself, which he saw as drifting inexorably away from figuration. In Aufräumen, he has managed to include figurative elements, yet the overall effect is unquestionably abstract. Indeed, the artist has deliberately obfuscated and distorted the entire concept of art as a means of communication or representation, tapping into an iconography which he refers to as 'post-non-figurative': the recognisable elements included within this composition only serve to highlight the extent to which these visible entities mean little in their own rights. Instead, they are present as the proof of their own creation, as traces of the various methods and processes that have brought about their existence on the canvas. In this, and indeed in the deliberately illogical orientation of the canvas, Aufräumen takes a lesson from another German painter, Georg Baselitz, whose upside-down paintings are here surpassed. The arbitrary nature of Baselitz's inverted images finds its new incarnation in the frenzied, varied marks of Aufräumen. Here, Oehlen has deliberately barraged the viewer with a crazed cornucopia of devices, motifs and techniques and has thereby deconstructed the entire nature of picture-making, in terms of both process and content.