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Lot Essay
THREE IMPORTANT WORKS BY ALBERT OEHLEN
Albert Oehlen is one of contemporary art’s most iconoclastic figures. Protégé of Polke, comrade of Kippenberger and enfant terrible of the 1980s, Oehlen’s wildly experimental impulse was a trailblazing force within the post-Punk generation. His cataclysmic dialogue with painting at a time when Minimalism and Conceptualism had declared it dead marked him out as a leading figure within the revolutionary second wave of German post-war art. Refusing to conform to the aesthetic of purity that reigned within the academy, Oehlen’s unabashed collision of vastly eclectic visual registers was inspirational to the notorious Jung Wilde (young wild artists) with which he is frequently associated. From figurative to abstract, geometric to gestural, articulated through fusion, interruption, contradiction and negation, Oehlen’s oeuvre bears witness to a reinvigoration of painting through a fearless undermining of its age-old sanctity. Widely exhibited and universally celebrated, Oehlen was Professor of Painting at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf from 2000 to 2009. In 2013, alongside his inclusion in the 55th Venice Biennale under the curatorial eye of Massimiliano Gioni, a major survey of his career took place at the Museum Moderner Kunst, Vienna, highlighting the rich and influential scope of his practice. This year, the Museum Folkwang in Essen hosts the exhibition Albert Oehlen: Talking About Painting, a selection of works curated by the artist at the site of his groundbreaking 1984 group show Truth is Work.
Born in Krefeld in 1954, Oehlen moved to Berlin in 1977, where he fantasised about new art forms whilst working as a waiter and decorator with his friend, the artist Werner Büttner. An important source of early inspiration was Jörg Immendorff, whom Oehlen had previously met at an action group, and whose penchant for the whimsical and ironic had a strong impact on the young artist. Oehlen’s radical artistic tendencies found keen expression in these early years and, having been officially charged for painting a mural on a local bookshop with Büttner, the two artists formed the tongue-in-cheek ‘League for the Prevention of Contradictory Behaviour’. This type of irreverence was to become a critical force in Oehlen’s artistic development, and was to define his important relationship with Kippenberger in subsequent years. In 1978, Oehlen studied painting at the Hochscule für Bildende Künste, Hamburg, under the tutelage of the legendary artist Sigmar Polke. ‘Polke more or less tried to show us that he wasn’t able to teach us something in the classical sense, so he gave us a main lecture for every artist, which is to destroy a chair’, Oehlen recalls. ‘I couldn’t say what Polke’s influence was, but it’s his radicality. When you start to work as an artist everybody thinks about radicality, like how could you make the most shocking thing. And it’s not easy ... Polke is somebody who had a role in that; in a way he made very radical things’ (A. Oehlen, quoted in Pataphysics Magazine, 1990, https://www.pataphysicsmagazine.com/oehlen_interview.html [accessed 27 May 2014]).
Oehlen first met Martin Kippenberger in the late 1970s, but it was in the 1980s that the two developed a close friendship that drove the production of some of their finest work. Oehlen and Kippenberger were both represented by Max Hetzler in the formative years of his gallery, and together spearheaded the riotous group of artists known affectionately as the ‘Hetzler boys’. They ruled the Cologne art scene, engaged in loud and wide-ranging discussions and took the city’s night life by storm. ‘They were artists who took extreme positions and brought a sharp intelligence to bear’, recalls Hetzler; Oehlen himself remembers how ‘we spurred each other on and everyone wanted to wow everyone else ... we were euphorics’ (M. Hetlzer and A. Oehlen, quoted in S. Kippenberger, Kippenberger: The Artist and His Families, Berlin 2007, pp. 246 and 264). As Büttner explains, ‘it was all about who was quickest with the bright ideas ... We were a reaction to the terrible ’70s, when everything was so normal and black and white’ (W. Büttner, quoted in S. Kippenberger, Kippenberger: The Artist and His Families, Berlin 2007, p. 264). Competitive and motivated, Oehlen and Kippenberger combined uproarious public personalities and extreme prankster behaviour with a mutual dedication to reinventing the conceptual parameters of painting. They collaborated on art and music projects, exhibited and lectured together, shared a flat in Vienna and worked and travelled around Spain. ‘I’m never bored with Albert’, Kippenberger told Artfan. ‘He sees the whole panorama of your discoveries, the big picture, and he has one too’ (M. Kippenberger, quoted in S. Kippenberger, Kippenberger: The Artist and His Families, Berlin 2007, p. 276).
Oehlen’s practice is founded on the notion that the value of painting is located in its very process – an attitude encapsulated by his self-imposed term ‘post-non-representational’. As Christoph Schreier has written, ‘he adopts the critical attitude of Conceptual Art, but articulates if not from the outside, but from the inside – from inside the painting itself’ (C. Shreier, ‘Storm Damage – Albert Oehlen’s Painting as a Visual Stress Test’ in Albert Oehlen, exh. cat., Kunstmuseum Bonn, Bonn, 2012, p. 71). In this way, Oehlen’s work performs a critique of the medium whilst simultaneously indicating new directions for its continued development. The punctured, fractured explosive surfaces of his paintings bear witness to a rigorous – and vigorous – testing of the limits of the medium. ‘The formal encumbrances and annoyances that a work of art can endure define its dignity’, Oehlen has said (A. Oehlen, quoted in R. Beil, ‘Rotlichtbezirk: Vom Eros de Verunreinigung im Oeurve Albert Oehlen’ in Albert Oehlen: Selbtsportrait mit 50-millionenfacher Lichtgeschwindigkeit, exh. cat., Musée cantonal des Beaux-Arts de Lausanne, Zurich, 2004, p. 36). Oehlen’s early works fulfilled this claim through devastating conglomerations of figural subject matter, but it was his move towards abstraction in the late 1980s that truly allowed the artist free reign in what has been variously described as his ‘exorcism’ of painting. By stripping away all standards, painting could become anything; by casting out any sense of obligation, new pathways could become visible. Oehlen’s experimental framework has allowed him to import images from advertising and commerce as well as elements derived from photography, collage, printing and, more recently, computer technology: all at the service of a once-isolated and untouchable medium. By taking a hammer to its pedestal, Oehlen carved a new space for painting in the postmodern world.
Through bombastic engagement with the historical clichés, narratives and techniques of painting, Oehlen’s work sits within the trajectory of so-called ‘bad painting’ that was rife among his contemporaries. Construed as a deliberate rejection of standard aesthetic values, ‘bad painting’ has been responsible for some of the most intriguing creations of the post-war period, not least within Oehlen’s oeuvre. Reflecting upon his practice in a recent interview, Oehlen claims ‘That’s the interesting thing about art: that somehow, you use your material to make something that results in something beautiful, via a path no-one has yet trodden. That means working with something that is improbable, where your predecessors would have said “You can’t do that”. First you take a step towards ugliness and then, somehow or other, you wind up where it’s beautiful’ (A. Oehlen, quoted in Monopol: Magazin für Kunst und Leben, Vol. 1, 2010). Interestingly, this type of approach has produced unexpected connections with a host of different artistic languages: the gestural intricacies of Cy Twombly, the painterly gestures of Willem de Kooning and the detachment of American Pop Art, as well as the German lineage of artists such as Anselm Kiefer, Asger Jorn and Georg Baselitz. Perhaps the strongest international connection is the American painter and printmaker Christopher Wool who exhibited with Oehlen in the 1980s at the formative stages of his own career, and who has been a similarly prominent driving force in forging new modes of expression for painting in the twentieth and twenty-first century.
***
‘Oehlen is more concerned with the process than with the goal. He never pursues a pre-existing, overall vision, or works according to a creative master plan. Instead, he “fills” his substrates with continually new pictorial postulates that are attuned to each other, until he reaches the point where they can hardly tame the food of colours and forms, or absorb them in an orderly fashion. This is especially true of the works that date from that late nineteen-eighties and early nineteen-nineties’ (C. Schreier, ‘Storm Damage - Albert Oehlen’s Painting as a Visual Stress Test’, Albert Oehlen, exh. cat., Kunstmuseum Bonn, Bonn, 2012, p. 77).
A flooded panorama of gold and aqua, peach, silver and lilac confronts the viewer in Albert Oehlen’s Untitled. Definitive lines and curves combine with smeared swathes and fragile rivulets, obfuscating and contradicting one another as Oehlen drags, coaxes, sprays and plasters his infinite layers of oil, resin and enamel. Executed in 1989, the work is situated at the dawn of Oehlen’s deep engagement with painterly abstraction – a move that was to propel his revolutionary oeuvre into new realms of technical sophistication. Forging new directions for painting at a time when the academy had declared it dead, it was through his abstract works that Oehlen was truly able to highlight the inexhaustible – and unexhausted – potential of the medium. Here, striking blocks of colour sit alongside hazy palimpsests that bleed and intermingle with one another, whilst circular and horizontal gestural streaks engage in a mesmerizing compositional dialogue. Startling geometric forms emerge amidst this dense amalgamation, yet as we observe the work we are faintly reminded of known images: of speed caught on camera, of thin clouds that veil the moon, of whirlpools and hurricanes. Merging visual complexity with lyrical elegance, the present work is a virtuosic testimony to Oehlen’s exuberant and irreverent contribution to contemporary painting.
Bursting onto the German art scene in the early 1980s, Oehlen countered the prevailing sobriety of Minimalist and Conceptual art with a radical new vision for painting, shredding apart its history and forcing it into the modern age. For Oehlen, the key to painting lay in its process, and the myriad juxtapositions we observe in the present work bear witness to this conviction. ‘I require of myself that my paintings be comprehensible’, claims Oehlen. ‘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 ... 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: Albert Oehlen’, in ArtForum, November 1994). Operating under the belief that one must broach ugliness in order to achieve beauty, Oehlen is frequently associated with the aesthetic of ‘bad painting’, a deliberate disregarding of conventional standards that, through fearless inhibition, pushed the boundaries of taste and technique in the 1980s. Disparate individual elements clamour for attention in Oehlen’s works, each laden with art historical resonance yet endowed with new meaning by the artist’s deliberate mishandling of them. The results of this approach are expertly showcased in the present work, in which unexpected collision gives way to glorious prismatic effects and sumptuous formal depths.
It was whilst living in Spain with his close friend Martin Kippenberger that Oehlen made a decisive move away from his output of figurative compositions and self-portraits and began to work in a more specifically abstract manner. Having conceived of his practice as a regenerative tour de force of the history of painting, Oehlen had always dreamed of a new abstract language, and the works that he produced both during and following his time working alongside Kippenberger in Spain represent a move towards painterly maturity in scope and execution. Carving a reactionary place for himself within the lineage of German abstract painting, driven by the radicalism of his former teacher Sigmar Polke, Oehlen’s work has engaged multiple divergent visual registers, drawing together elements from American Abstract Expressionism and European modernism as well as contemporary influences from popular culture and the media. Yet in splicing and recombining these precedents, Oehlen is keen to divorce his work from the postmodern practice of quotation, creating works that he sardonically describes as ‘post-non-representational’. Typical of the artist’s anarchic tendencies, it is this fervent rejection of rigid allegiance that has allowed Oehlen to craft striking new visions for the future of painting.
Albert Oehlen is one of contemporary art’s most iconoclastic figures. Protégé of Polke, comrade of Kippenberger and enfant terrible of the 1980s, Oehlen’s wildly experimental impulse was a trailblazing force within the post-Punk generation. His cataclysmic dialogue with painting at a time when Minimalism and Conceptualism had declared it dead marked him out as a leading figure within the revolutionary second wave of German post-war art. Refusing to conform to the aesthetic of purity that reigned within the academy, Oehlen’s unabashed collision of vastly eclectic visual registers was inspirational to the notorious Jung Wilde (young wild artists) with which he is frequently associated. From figurative to abstract, geometric to gestural, articulated through fusion, interruption, contradiction and negation, Oehlen’s oeuvre bears witness to a reinvigoration of painting through a fearless undermining of its age-old sanctity. Widely exhibited and universally celebrated, Oehlen was Professor of Painting at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf from 2000 to 2009. In 2013, alongside his inclusion in the 55th Venice Biennale under the curatorial eye of Massimiliano Gioni, a major survey of his career took place at the Museum Moderner Kunst, Vienna, highlighting the rich and influential scope of his practice. This year, the Museum Folkwang in Essen hosts the exhibition Albert Oehlen: Talking About Painting, a selection of works curated by the artist at the site of his groundbreaking 1984 group show Truth is Work.
Born in Krefeld in 1954, Oehlen moved to Berlin in 1977, where he fantasised about new art forms whilst working as a waiter and decorator with his friend, the artist Werner Büttner. An important source of early inspiration was Jörg Immendorff, whom Oehlen had previously met at an action group, and whose penchant for the whimsical and ironic had a strong impact on the young artist. Oehlen’s radical artistic tendencies found keen expression in these early years and, having been officially charged for painting a mural on a local bookshop with Büttner, the two artists formed the tongue-in-cheek ‘League for the Prevention of Contradictory Behaviour’. This type of irreverence was to become a critical force in Oehlen’s artistic development, and was to define his important relationship with Kippenberger in subsequent years. In 1978, Oehlen studied painting at the Hochscule für Bildende Künste, Hamburg, under the tutelage of the legendary artist Sigmar Polke. ‘Polke more or less tried to show us that he wasn’t able to teach us something in the classical sense, so he gave us a main lecture for every artist, which is to destroy a chair’, Oehlen recalls. ‘I couldn’t say what Polke’s influence was, but it’s his radicality. When you start to work as an artist everybody thinks about radicality, like how could you make the most shocking thing. And it’s not easy ... Polke is somebody who had a role in that; in a way he made very radical things’ (A. Oehlen, quoted in Pataphysics Magazine, 1990, https://www.pataphysicsmagazine.com/oehlen_interview.html [accessed 27 May 2014]).
Oehlen first met Martin Kippenberger in the late 1970s, but it was in the 1980s that the two developed a close friendship that drove the production of some of their finest work. Oehlen and Kippenberger were both represented by Max Hetzler in the formative years of his gallery, and together spearheaded the riotous group of artists known affectionately as the ‘Hetzler boys’. They ruled the Cologne art scene, engaged in loud and wide-ranging discussions and took the city’s night life by storm. ‘They were artists who took extreme positions and brought a sharp intelligence to bear’, recalls Hetzler; Oehlen himself remembers how ‘we spurred each other on and everyone wanted to wow everyone else ... we were euphorics’ (M. Hetlzer and A. Oehlen, quoted in S. Kippenberger, Kippenberger: The Artist and His Families, Berlin 2007, pp. 246 and 264). As Büttner explains, ‘it was all about who was quickest with the bright ideas ... We were a reaction to the terrible ’70s, when everything was so normal and black and white’ (W. Büttner, quoted in S. Kippenberger, Kippenberger: The Artist and His Families, Berlin 2007, p. 264). Competitive and motivated, Oehlen and Kippenberger combined uproarious public personalities and extreme prankster behaviour with a mutual dedication to reinventing the conceptual parameters of painting. They collaborated on art and music projects, exhibited and lectured together, shared a flat in Vienna and worked and travelled around Spain. ‘I’m never bored with Albert’, Kippenberger told Artfan. ‘He sees the whole panorama of your discoveries, the big picture, and he has one too’ (M. Kippenberger, quoted in S. Kippenberger, Kippenberger: The Artist and His Families, Berlin 2007, p. 276).
Oehlen’s practice is founded on the notion that the value of painting is located in its very process – an attitude encapsulated by his self-imposed term ‘post-non-representational’. As Christoph Schreier has written, ‘he adopts the critical attitude of Conceptual Art, but articulates if not from the outside, but from the inside – from inside the painting itself’ (C. Shreier, ‘Storm Damage – Albert Oehlen’s Painting as a Visual Stress Test’ in Albert Oehlen, exh. cat., Kunstmuseum Bonn, Bonn, 2012, p. 71). In this way, Oehlen’s work performs a critique of the medium whilst simultaneously indicating new directions for its continued development. The punctured, fractured explosive surfaces of his paintings bear witness to a rigorous – and vigorous – testing of the limits of the medium. ‘The formal encumbrances and annoyances that a work of art can endure define its dignity’, Oehlen has said (A. Oehlen, quoted in R. Beil, ‘Rotlichtbezirk: Vom Eros de Verunreinigung im Oeurve Albert Oehlen’ in Albert Oehlen: Selbtsportrait mit 50-millionenfacher Lichtgeschwindigkeit, exh. cat., Musée cantonal des Beaux-Arts de Lausanne, Zurich, 2004, p. 36). Oehlen’s early works fulfilled this claim through devastating conglomerations of figural subject matter, but it was his move towards abstraction in the late 1980s that truly allowed the artist free reign in what has been variously described as his ‘exorcism’ of painting. By stripping away all standards, painting could become anything; by casting out any sense of obligation, new pathways could become visible. Oehlen’s experimental framework has allowed him to import images from advertising and commerce as well as elements derived from photography, collage, printing and, more recently, computer technology: all at the service of a once-isolated and untouchable medium. By taking a hammer to its pedestal, Oehlen carved a new space for painting in the postmodern world.
Through bombastic engagement with the historical clichés, narratives and techniques of painting, Oehlen’s work sits within the trajectory of so-called ‘bad painting’ that was rife among his contemporaries. Construed as a deliberate rejection of standard aesthetic values, ‘bad painting’ has been responsible for some of the most intriguing creations of the post-war period, not least within Oehlen’s oeuvre. Reflecting upon his practice in a recent interview, Oehlen claims ‘That’s the interesting thing about art: that somehow, you use your material to make something that results in something beautiful, via a path no-one has yet trodden. That means working with something that is improbable, where your predecessors would have said “You can’t do that”. First you take a step towards ugliness and then, somehow or other, you wind up where it’s beautiful’ (A. Oehlen, quoted in Monopol: Magazin für Kunst und Leben, Vol. 1, 2010). Interestingly, this type of approach has produced unexpected connections with a host of different artistic languages: the gestural intricacies of Cy Twombly, the painterly gestures of Willem de Kooning and the detachment of American Pop Art, as well as the German lineage of artists such as Anselm Kiefer, Asger Jorn and Georg Baselitz. Perhaps the strongest international connection is the American painter and printmaker Christopher Wool who exhibited with Oehlen in the 1980s at the formative stages of his own career, and who has been a similarly prominent driving force in forging new modes of expression for painting in the twentieth and twenty-first century.
***
‘Oehlen is more concerned with the process than with the goal. He never pursues a pre-existing, overall vision, or works according to a creative master plan. Instead, he “fills” his substrates with continually new pictorial postulates that are attuned to each other, until he reaches the point where they can hardly tame the food of colours and forms, or absorb them in an orderly fashion. This is especially true of the works that date from that late nineteen-eighties and early nineteen-nineties’ (C. Schreier, ‘Storm Damage - Albert Oehlen’s Painting as a Visual Stress Test’, Albert Oehlen, exh. cat., Kunstmuseum Bonn, Bonn, 2012, p. 77).
A flooded panorama of gold and aqua, peach, silver and lilac confronts the viewer in Albert Oehlen’s Untitled. Definitive lines and curves combine with smeared swathes and fragile rivulets, obfuscating and contradicting one another as Oehlen drags, coaxes, sprays and plasters his infinite layers of oil, resin and enamel. Executed in 1989, the work is situated at the dawn of Oehlen’s deep engagement with painterly abstraction – a move that was to propel his revolutionary oeuvre into new realms of technical sophistication. Forging new directions for painting at a time when the academy had declared it dead, it was through his abstract works that Oehlen was truly able to highlight the inexhaustible – and unexhausted – potential of the medium. Here, striking blocks of colour sit alongside hazy palimpsests that bleed and intermingle with one another, whilst circular and horizontal gestural streaks engage in a mesmerizing compositional dialogue. Startling geometric forms emerge amidst this dense amalgamation, yet as we observe the work we are faintly reminded of known images: of speed caught on camera, of thin clouds that veil the moon, of whirlpools and hurricanes. Merging visual complexity with lyrical elegance, the present work is a virtuosic testimony to Oehlen’s exuberant and irreverent contribution to contemporary painting.
Bursting onto the German art scene in the early 1980s, Oehlen countered the prevailing sobriety of Minimalist and Conceptual art with a radical new vision for painting, shredding apart its history and forcing it into the modern age. For Oehlen, the key to painting lay in its process, and the myriad juxtapositions we observe in the present work bear witness to this conviction. ‘I require of myself that my paintings be comprehensible’, claims Oehlen. ‘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 ... 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: Albert Oehlen’, in ArtForum, November 1994). Operating under the belief that one must broach ugliness in order to achieve beauty, Oehlen is frequently associated with the aesthetic of ‘bad painting’, a deliberate disregarding of conventional standards that, through fearless inhibition, pushed the boundaries of taste and technique in the 1980s. Disparate individual elements clamour for attention in Oehlen’s works, each laden with art historical resonance yet endowed with new meaning by the artist’s deliberate mishandling of them. The results of this approach are expertly showcased in the present work, in which unexpected collision gives way to glorious prismatic effects and sumptuous formal depths.
It was whilst living in Spain with his close friend Martin Kippenberger that Oehlen made a decisive move away from his output of figurative compositions and self-portraits and began to work in a more specifically abstract manner. Having conceived of his practice as a regenerative tour de force of the history of painting, Oehlen had always dreamed of a new abstract language, and the works that he produced both during and following his time working alongside Kippenberger in Spain represent a move towards painterly maturity in scope and execution. Carving a reactionary place for himself within the lineage of German abstract painting, driven by the radicalism of his former teacher Sigmar Polke, Oehlen’s work has engaged multiple divergent visual registers, drawing together elements from American Abstract Expressionism and European modernism as well as contemporary influences from popular culture and the media. Yet in splicing and recombining these precedents, Oehlen is keen to divorce his work from the postmodern practice of quotation, creating works that he sardonically describes as ‘post-non-representational’. Typical of the artist’s anarchic tendencies, it is this fervent rejection of rigid allegiance that has allowed Oehlen to craft striking new visions for the future of painting.