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Lot Essay
‘I don’t think you can really, seriously—or philosophically—try to find out what it is that a painting does to you. It’s contradictory. You can’t come to an end because, if it’s good, it’s beautiful—everything that’s good will be at the end called beautiful. But I like very much if you do things that seem to be forbidden and seem to be impossible, like a test of courage.’
—ALBERT OEHLEN
With its dense pools of paint flowing across a frenzy of swooping lines, Output 3 (2003) by Albert Oehlen overlayers digital and manual mark-making techniques to produce a searing display of colour and line. A screenprinted digital design, to which Oehlen has added his own splashes and sprays of paint, Oehlen’s work is a bewildering tapestry of deforming patterns: variegated, jaggedly pixelated lines intertwine, while blurry purple and orange masses collect around the corners of the canvas and clouds of white and grey sit on its surface. Amidst this visceral chaos, a strange sense of depth is generated between the flat digital lines and the layers of paint applied over them, as the eye flickers between the multiple planes of the painting.
Having been associated with the ‘Bad Painting’ label throughout the late 1980s for his bitterly ironic, kitsch figurative painting, the end of the decade saw the artist re-orientate himself, first moving away from figuration in 1988, before beginning to incorporate the computer into his work in 1990. Despite this shift in style however, Oehlen’s computer images remain animated by his interest in producing works that explored a certain ‘bad’ quality: realising the swiftness with which technological advancements would date digital art, from the beginning Oehlen’s work looked to exploit this inevitable obsolescence by deploying the computer as crudely as possible, using a simple computer program on a basic Texas Instruments machine to produce these low-resolution thickets of patterns and lines in garishly kaleidoscopic colour schemes.
But for Oehlen, at the root of this ‘bad painting’ lies a serious anxiety about how to paint under the crushing weight of art history, or what seems to be the end of a tradition; just as he presented a hollowed-out version of figurative painting, so too is this work touched by the sense of an exhaustion of possibilities for image-making. As Stephan Berg has said ‘it was the limitedness… of the possibilities offered by these computer programs that induced the painter to work with them at all. The appeal lay not in expanding the painterly possibilities through mechanical, technical refinements, but rather in limiting them’ (S. Berg, ‘Cold Fever’, in Albert Oehlen: Terpentin 2012, exh. cat., Kunstmuseum Bonn, New York, 2012, p. 33). Output 3 is a striking testament of the artist’s struggle against these limitations, creating something uncompromisingly new that both asks serious questions about the role of painting today and is at the same time – almost in spite of itself – visually stunning.
—ALBERT OEHLEN
With its dense pools of paint flowing across a frenzy of swooping lines, Output 3 (2003) by Albert Oehlen overlayers digital and manual mark-making techniques to produce a searing display of colour and line. A screenprinted digital design, to which Oehlen has added his own splashes and sprays of paint, Oehlen’s work is a bewildering tapestry of deforming patterns: variegated, jaggedly pixelated lines intertwine, while blurry purple and orange masses collect around the corners of the canvas and clouds of white and grey sit on its surface. Amidst this visceral chaos, a strange sense of depth is generated between the flat digital lines and the layers of paint applied over them, as the eye flickers between the multiple planes of the painting.
Having been associated with the ‘Bad Painting’ label throughout the late 1980s for his bitterly ironic, kitsch figurative painting, the end of the decade saw the artist re-orientate himself, first moving away from figuration in 1988, before beginning to incorporate the computer into his work in 1990. Despite this shift in style however, Oehlen’s computer images remain animated by his interest in producing works that explored a certain ‘bad’ quality: realising the swiftness with which technological advancements would date digital art, from the beginning Oehlen’s work looked to exploit this inevitable obsolescence by deploying the computer as crudely as possible, using a simple computer program on a basic Texas Instruments machine to produce these low-resolution thickets of patterns and lines in garishly kaleidoscopic colour schemes.
But for Oehlen, at the root of this ‘bad painting’ lies a serious anxiety about how to paint under the crushing weight of art history, or what seems to be the end of a tradition; just as he presented a hollowed-out version of figurative painting, so too is this work touched by the sense of an exhaustion of possibilities for image-making. As Stephan Berg has said ‘it was the limitedness… of the possibilities offered by these computer programs that induced the painter to work with them at all. The appeal lay not in expanding the painterly possibilities through mechanical, technical refinements, but rather in limiting them’ (S. Berg, ‘Cold Fever’, in Albert Oehlen: Terpentin 2012, exh. cat., Kunstmuseum Bonn, New York, 2012, p. 33). Output 3 is a striking testament of the artist’s struggle against these limitations, creating something uncompromisingly new that both asks serious questions about the role of painting today and is at the same time – almost in spite of itself – visually stunning.