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Lot Essay
Albert Oehlen’s painterly sensibility—at once mercurial, anarchic and omnivorous—captures the short-circuit attention span and cognitive dissonance that have come to define contemporary culture. The artist’s recent series of large-scale paintings incorporating printed paper collage with imagery drawn from advertisements, corporate logos, slogans and other mundane graphics presents the viewer with an onslaught of visual information that never quite adheres to form a cohesive whole. Slashes and streams of purple and blue oil paint traverse clouds of ghostly gray and brown, obscuring rather than unifying the various paper clippings attached to the canvas underneath. The effect is something akin to the chaotic disorientation and breakdown of communication described in Yeats’ famous poem, The Second Coming: “Turning and turning in the widening gyre / The falcon cannot hear the falconer; / Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold” (W.B. Yeats, “The Second Coming,” 1-3).
FM 55 embodies the riotous creative spirit of Oehlen’s 2012 exhibition at Gagosian Gallery’s flagship Manhattan outpost, of which it was a standout. In creating these works, the artist utilized computer-aided design (CAD) as a counterpoint to his gestural abstraction, creating a visceral tension between these conflicting modes of representation and abstraction, respectively. The paintings become something akin to arenas where the disparate and intense elements compete for the viewer’s attention. The eye is compelled to race across the canvas, adding and subtracting stimuli, only to discover that the balance is somehow irreconcilable. As the press release for the exhibition describes, “the open-ended, ‘unfinished’ dialogue between binary oppositions is unsettling yet compelling: in any one work, the paint, the collaged pictures and texts, and patches of white canvas each occupy their own space, like a worktable clutter without a center, such as FM 53 and FM 55” ("Albert Oehlen," Gagosian Gallery, New York, n.p., 12 Feb. 2012).
Oehlen casts a long shadow over the landscape of contemporary art, both European and American, stretching from the early 1980s to today. Given the formal complexities of his often chimeric output, the artist’s explanation for the inspiration behind the series to which FM 55 is deceptively uncomplicated: “I stuck posters on the canvas and smeared paint over them. That may sound simple, but as a painting project it turned out to be pretty difficult. I was aiming at abstract painting that had an innate irritability caused by the obtrusive advertisements” (A. Oehlen quoted in Albert Oehlen 1991 2008, exh. cat., Galerie Max Hetzler, Berlin, 2008, p. 81). The provocative nature of these paintings lends itself, interestingly enough, to the ultimately satisfying—yet impossible—task of making sense of them.
FM 55 embodies the riotous creative spirit of Oehlen’s 2012 exhibition at Gagosian Gallery’s flagship Manhattan outpost, of which it was a standout. In creating these works, the artist utilized computer-aided design (CAD) as a counterpoint to his gestural abstraction, creating a visceral tension between these conflicting modes of representation and abstraction, respectively. The paintings become something akin to arenas where the disparate and intense elements compete for the viewer’s attention. The eye is compelled to race across the canvas, adding and subtracting stimuli, only to discover that the balance is somehow irreconcilable. As the press release for the exhibition describes, “the open-ended, ‘unfinished’ dialogue between binary oppositions is unsettling yet compelling: in any one work, the paint, the collaged pictures and texts, and patches of white canvas each occupy their own space, like a worktable clutter without a center, such as FM 53 and FM 55” ("Albert Oehlen," Gagosian Gallery, New York, n.p., 12 Feb. 2012).
Oehlen casts a long shadow over the landscape of contemporary art, both European and American, stretching from the early 1980s to today. Given the formal complexities of his often chimeric output, the artist’s explanation for the inspiration behind the series to which FM 55 is deceptively uncomplicated: “I stuck posters on the canvas and smeared paint over them. That may sound simple, but as a painting project it turned out to be pretty difficult. I was aiming at abstract painting that had an innate irritability caused by the obtrusive advertisements” (A. Oehlen quoted in Albert Oehlen 1991 2008, exh. cat., Galerie Max Hetzler, Berlin, 2008, p. 81). The provocative nature of these paintings lends itself, interestingly enough, to the ultimately satisfying—yet impossible—task of making sense of them.