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Lot Essay
‘Qualities that I want to see brought together: delicacy and coarseness, colour and vagueness, and, underlying them all, a base note of hysteria.’ – Albert Oehlen
Äpfel und Zeitungen is a boisterous and vivid work from a series of fabric paintings created by Albert Oehlen between 1992 and 1996. Two patterned swatches of printed fabric form the painting’s backdrop. Atop this decorative background, Oehlen conjures a kaleidoscope in oil paint: ribbons of turquoise, flashes of marigold, a wash of white, brown and red. On the left, an oval edged in grey mirrors a portal on the right-hand side, a window through this pictorial plane. In the centre, two eye forms allude to a partial self-portrait. Oehlen’s work, argues curator Massmiliano Gioni, ‘has been subsumed under the logic of collage’ (M. Gioni, ‘Albert Oehlen: Stupid as a Painter’, Albert Oehlen: Home and Garden, exh. cat., New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York, 2015, p. 16). Indeed, collage as rhetoric is a central consideration in the artist’s practice, embodied in Äpfel und Zeitungen by the seemingly clashing forms and materials, and the reuse of textile samples across multiple works. Oehlen’s abstraction is predicated on the spatial conflict between geometry and colour, the interplay of painted temporalities. As curator Martin Clark writes, ‘If cubism attempted to render the object in time and space through the imposition of multiple specular viewpoints, Oehlen appears to imagine the painting in several parallel universes. It looks like numerous pictures have been painted, one on top of the other, all occupying the same space, bleeding into and out of each other, revealing and obscuring, informing and concealing’ (M. Clark, ‘Abstract Painting Must Die Now’, Albert Oehlen: I Will Always Champion Good Painting, exh. cat., Whitechapel Gallery, London 2006, p. 58). Oehlen often begins a painting by imposing a series of rules to govern his swirls and smears; the ensuing chaos is, as such, deliberate. In Äpfel und Zeitungen, Oehlen has painted a play of forms, a thoughtfully all-consuming burst of vibrant expression.
Äpfel und Zeitungen is a boisterous and vivid work from a series of fabric paintings created by Albert Oehlen between 1992 and 1996. Two patterned swatches of printed fabric form the painting’s backdrop. Atop this decorative background, Oehlen conjures a kaleidoscope in oil paint: ribbons of turquoise, flashes of marigold, a wash of white, brown and red. On the left, an oval edged in grey mirrors a portal on the right-hand side, a window through this pictorial plane. In the centre, two eye forms allude to a partial self-portrait. Oehlen’s work, argues curator Massmiliano Gioni, ‘has been subsumed under the logic of collage’ (M. Gioni, ‘Albert Oehlen: Stupid as a Painter’, Albert Oehlen: Home and Garden, exh. cat., New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York, 2015, p. 16). Indeed, collage as rhetoric is a central consideration in the artist’s practice, embodied in Äpfel und Zeitungen by the seemingly clashing forms and materials, and the reuse of textile samples across multiple works. Oehlen’s abstraction is predicated on the spatial conflict between geometry and colour, the interplay of painted temporalities. As curator Martin Clark writes, ‘If cubism attempted to render the object in time and space through the imposition of multiple specular viewpoints, Oehlen appears to imagine the painting in several parallel universes. It looks like numerous pictures have been painted, one on top of the other, all occupying the same space, bleeding into and out of each other, revealing and obscuring, informing and concealing’ (M. Clark, ‘Abstract Painting Must Die Now’, Albert Oehlen: I Will Always Champion Good Painting, exh. cat., Whitechapel Gallery, London 2006, p. 58). Oehlen often begins a painting by imposing a series of rules to govern his swirls and smears; the ensuing chaos is, as such, deliberate. In Äpfel und Zeitungen, Oehlen has painted a play of forms, a thoughtfully all-consuming burst of vibrant expression.