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Lot Essay
'For me, painting is just one of the many possible ways of making art. So I can romp around in it. And now that I'm having fun with it, I can take its postulates very seriously.' (A. Oehlen quoted in 'The Rules of the Game: Diedrich Diederichsen visits Albert Oehlen,' in Artforum, November, 1994, p.71).
A cornucopia of colour, fragmented imagery and elegant, sprawling lines, Weiter perfectly encapsulates what its title implies: further, or indeed, a sense of going beyond. In a palimpsest of abstract and figurative elements with a hint of the decorative, Albert Oehlen has ingeniously infused styles and epochs to create a dazzling collage effect, strident against a background of sheer white. Swirling, meanderingcurves extending so boldly across lush hues of verdant green, recall calligraphic practices, or even the gestures of Abstract Expressionism. In what is an intriguing and innovative methodology, some of these details in Weiter have been applied not as direct gestures on the part of the artist, but with the collaboration of a computer, creating a dazzling juxtaposition between the handmade and the machine made.
Oehlen is one of the veterans of German iconoclasts who propelled to the forefront of the avant-garde in the late 1970s. Along with his friend Martin Kippenberger, Oehlen embarked on an irreverent intellectual assault on the precepts of art, particularly painting, which was enjoying a revival with the hubristic heroismof Neo-Expressionism. In the 1990s, Oehlen raised the stakes of his project, shifting his focus onto one of modernism's greatest legacies: abstract painting. He combined computer-generated imagery 'painted' with a mouse, and applied to a canvas with an inkjet printer, with more traditional painting media like oil and acrylic.
With Weiter, unlike some of his more dense canvases of the 1990s, Oehlen has left more of the background white, allowing the surface more room to breathe, thus creating a more striking contrast between the different elements. By dismantling painting's rigid practices and orthodoxies, creating a new extreme of content and process, Oehlen has indeed achieved his desire of invigorating painting.
A cornucopia of colour, fragmented imagery and elegant, sprawling lines, Weiter perfectly encapsulates what its title implies: further, or indeed, a sense of going beyond. In a palimpsest of abstract and figurative elements with a hint of the decorative, Albert Oehlen has ingeniously infused styles and epochs to create a dazzling collage effect, strident against a background of sheer white. Swirling, meanderingcurves extending so boldly across lush hues of verdant green, recall calligraphic practices, or even the gestures of Abstract Expressionism. In what is an intriguing and innovative methodology, some of these details in Weiter have been applied not as direct gestures on the part of the artist, but with the collaboration of a computer, creating a dazzling juxtaposition between the handmade and the machine made.
Oehlen is one of the veterans of German iconoclasts who propelled to the forefront of the avant-garde in the late 1970s. Along with his friend Martin Kippenberger, Oehlen embarked on an irreverent intellectual assault on the precepts of art, particularly painting, which was enjoying a revival with the hubristic heroismof Neo-Expressionism. In the 1990s, Oehlen raised the stakes of his project, shifting his focus onto one of modernism's greatest legacies: abstract painting. He combined computer-generated imagery 'painted' with a mouse, and applied to a canvas with an inkjet printer, with more traditional painting media like oil and acrylic.
With Weiter, unlike some of his more dense canvases of the 1990s, Oehlen has left more of the background white, allowing the surface more room to breathe, thus creating a more striking contrast between the different elements. By dismantling painting's rigid practices and orthodoxies, creating a new extreme of content and process, Oehlen has indeed achieved his desire of invigorating painting.