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Lot Essay
'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. Diederichsen, 'The Rules of the Game - Artist Albert Oehlen - Interview', in ArtForum, November 1994).
Standing before Albert Oehlen's monumental Auf- (der Strasse) schreiben (Writing [on the street]), 2000, the viewer is immersed in a kaleidoscopic spectrum of colour. Sweeping across the monumental canvas washes of bright day-glo pink, lime green, and lemon yellow are interrupted by hazy streaks of purple spray enamel and bold strokes of milky white. Created entirely through various methods of painting, Auf- (der Strasse) schreiben is a unique departure from the digital collages the artist was producing in the early 2000s, and was included in the artist's solo exhibition I Will Always Champion Good Painting at Whitechapel Gallery, London, in 2006.
Forming part of an on-going investigation into the process of mark making, the layers of paint achieve an almost graffiti-like finish as invoked by the work's title. In the absence of any obvious focal point, the viewer'seyes are drawn in a multitude of directions. Various incongruous graphic elements converge in the vast fields of colour, converting the abstract into a surreal landscape. Here, a Dal%a%-esque skeleton saunters confidentially into the foreground, while a deliberately blurred dog perches atop a Corinthian column just right of center, their juxtaposition confounding traditional art historical iconography. A student of Sigmar Polke, Oehlen takes great effort to ensure the figures in his multi-layered images avoid any symbolic reference, in a practice which Iwona Blazwick suggests,'exceeds the codified discourse of painting, breaking through the laws of a visual language censored by grammar and semantics, as a kind of social and political protest' (I. Blazwick, I Will Always Champion Good Painting, exh. cat., Whitechapel Gallery, London 2006, p. 7).
One of the most important German painters of his generation, Oehlen emerged at a moment when painting had been pronounced dead; reinvigorating the medium by blending figurative and pictorial elements with abstract fields of colour. 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 asthe proof of their own creation, as traces of the various methods and processes that have brought about their existence on the canvas. As the artist stated of his practice, '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. Diederichsen, 'The Rules of the Game - Artist Albert Oehlen - Interview', in ArtForum, November 1994). Here,Oehlen has deliberately barraged the viewer with a crazed cornucopia of devices, motifs and techniques and has thereby deconstructed the entire nature of picturemaking, in terms of both process and content.
Standing before Albert Oehlen's monumental Auf- (der Strasse) schreiben (Writing [on the street]), 2000, the viewer is immersed in a kaleidoscopic spectrum of colour. Sweeping across the monumental canvas washes of bright day-glo pink, lime green, and lemon yellow are interrupted by hazy streaks of purple spray enamel and bold strokes of milky white. Created entirely through various methods of painting, Auf- (der Strasse) schreiben is a unique departure from the digital collages the artist was producing in the early 2000s, and was included in the artist's solo exhibition I Will Always Champion Good Painting at Whitechapel Gallery, London, in 2006.
Forming part of an on-going investigation into the process of mark making, the layers of paint achieve an almost graffiti-like finish as invoked by the work's title. In the absence of any obvious focal point, the viewer'seyes are drawn in a multitude of directions. Various incongruous graphic elements converge in the vast fields of colour, converting the abstract into a surreal landscape. Here, a Dal%a%-esque skeleton saunters confidentially into the foreground, while a deliberately blurred dog perches atop a Corinthian column just right of center, their juxtaposition confounding traditional art historical iconography. A student of Sigmar Polke, Oehlen takes great effort to ensure the figures in his multi-layered images avoid any symbolic reference, in a practice which Iwona Blazwick suggests,'exceeds the codified discourse of painting, breaking through the laws of a visual language censored by grammar and semantics, as a kind of social and political protest' (I. Blazwick, I Will Always Champion Good Painting, exh. cat., Whitechapel Gallery, London 2006, p. 7).
One of the most important German painters of his generation, Oehlen emerged at a moment when painting had been pronounced dead; reinvigorating the medium by blending figurative and pictorial elements with abstract fields of colour. 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 asthe proof of their own creation, as traces of the various methods and processes that have brought about their existence on the canvas. As the artist stated of his practice, '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. Diederichsen, 'The Rules of the Game - Artist Albert Oehlen - Interview', in ArtForum, November 1994). Here,Oehlen has deliberately barraged the viewer with a crazed cornucopia of devices, motifs and techniques and has thereby deconstructed the entire nature of picturemaking, in terms of both process and content.