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Lot Essay
‘The formal encumbrances and annoyances that a work of art can endure define its dignity’
–Albert Oehlen
Painted in 2003, Bigote (Moustache) is a vast, shimmering and playful work from Albert Oehlen’s celebrated series of Grey Paintings. Amid a hazy nebula of multi-directional grey strokes – shifting in tone from charcoal-dark to silvery white, and in hue from resinous warmth to cooler, bluish mists – emerges the curved form of a schematic grey moustache. The background threatens to cohere into a blurred image in a manner reminiscent of the grey ‘in-paintings’ of Gerhard Richter; the moustache, beset by a large, amorphous drip of whitish paint, seems ready to revert to abstraction. The Grey Paintings, which Oehlen made between 1997 and 2008, form an important part of a diverse oeuvre that has long been dedicated to the paradoxical undermining of painting, mounting a conceptual critique of the medium’s conventions from within. In works like Bigote, Oehlen melts the abstract and the figurative into a primordial neutrality from which shape seemingly cannot be banished. Other works from the series contain hints of interior and figure, or take a hilariously literal approach to the vaporous appearance of the paint, free-associating its foggy greys into the steam from a bath or the smoke from a cigarette. In his nod to the deeply serious greys of Richter, who sought to rigorously interrogate the very essentials of painting, Oehlen blurs the lines between reverence and satire. He questions his paintings’ ability to exist as self-defining, self-contained entities, wiping his slate clean only to brazenly re-involve the real world. Standing in front of a monochrome abstraction, he seems to say, we always want form, as if looking for shapes in the clouds. He second-guesses the viewer by mutating swooping brushstroke into moustache, and negation into a humorous, richly ambivalent mode of creation.
Christoph Schreier has described Oehlen’s practice as ‘a dialectic process that combines a factual affirmation of painting and its beauty with a good measure of scepticism toward all of its fundamental rules and regulations’ (C. Schreier, ‘Storm Damage – Albert Oehlen’s Painting as a Visual Stress Test’, in Albert Oehlen: Terpentin 2012, exh. cat. Kunstmuseum Bonn, Bonn 2012, p. 72). This is an apt description for the Grey Paintings too, which are not only paradoxical objects in themselves, but also exist in a dialectic relationship with another body of work: alongside these exercises in near-featureless grey, Oehlen was working on riotous painted and computer-based collages that were filled to bursting point with a cacophony of colour and content. In parallel with his explorations of emptiness, he was revelling in a superabundance of imagery. The Grey Paintings acted as something of a palate-cleanser, Oehlen has claimed – ‘I wanted to paint even more intensely coloured pictures, and I prescribed to myself the grey tones as therapy, in order to artificially heighten the lust for colour’ (A. Oehlen, quoted in H. Holzwarth, Albert Oehlen, Cologne 2009, p. 378) – and, while they seemingly operated to contradict the digital collages, so those works opposed the conceptual claims of the greys. In this double-barrelled approach, Oehlen’s overall body of work is made deliberately incoherent, and it becomes impossible to determine any fixed artistic position. Much like the artist himself, Bigote is disruptive, mercurial and mischievous, opening our eyes to the fundamental ambiguities of painting, and leaving us on thrillingly uncertain ground.
–Albert Oehlen
Painted in 2003, Bigote (Moustache) is a vast, shimmering and playful work from Albert Oehlen’s celebrated series of Grey Paintings. Amid a hazy nebula of multi-directional grey strokes – shifting in tone from charcoal-dark to silvery white, and in hue from resinous warmth to cooler, bluish mists – emerges the curved form of a schematic grey moustache. The background threatens to cohere into a blurred image in a manner reminiscent of the grey ‘in-paintings’ of Gerhard Richter; the moustache, beset by a large, amorphous drip of whitish paint, seems ready to revert to abstraction. The Grey Paintings, which Oehlen made between 1997 and 2008, form an important part of a diverse oeuvre that has long been dedicated to the paradoxical undermining of painting, mounting a conceptual critique of the medium’s conventions from within. In works like Bigote, Oehlen melts the abstract and the figurative into a primordial neutrality from which shape seemingly cannot be banished. Other works from the series contain hints of interior and figure, or take a hilariously literal approach to the vaporous appearance of the paint, free-associating its foggy greys into the steam from a bath or the smoke from a cigarette. In his nod to the deeply serious greys of Richter, who sought to rigorously interrogate the very essentials of painting, Oehlen blurs the lines between reverence and satire. He questions his paintings’ ability to exist as self-defining, self-contained entities, wiping his slate clean only to brazenly re-involve the real world. Standing in front of a monochrome abstraction, he seems to say, we always want form, as if looking for shapes in the clouds. He second-guesses the viewer by mutating swooping brushstroke into moustache, and negation into a humorous, richly ambivalent mode of creation.
Christoph Schreier has described Oehlen’s practice as ‘a dialectic process that combines a factual affirmation of painting and its beauty with a good measure of scepticism toward all of its fundamental rules and regulations’ (C. Schreier, ‘Storm Damage – Albert Oehlen’s Painting as a Visual Stress Test’, in Albert Oehlen: Terpentin 2012, exh. cat. Kunstmuseum Bonn, Bonn 2012, p. 72). This is an apt description for the Grey Paintings too, which are not only paradoxical objects in themselves, but also exist in a dialectic relationship with another body of work: alongside these exercises in near-featureless grey, Oehlen was working on riotous painted and computer-based collages that were filled to bursting point with a cacophony of colour and content. In parallel with his explorations of emptiness, he was revelling in a superabundance of imagery. The Grey Paintings acted as something of a palate-cleanser, Oehlen has claimed – ‘I wanted to paint even more intensely coloured pictures, and I prescribed to myself the grey tones as therapy, in order to artificially heighten the lust for colour’ (A. Oehlen, quoted in H. Holzwarth, Albert Oehlen, Cologne 2009, p. 378) – and, while they seemingly operated to contradict the digital collages, so those works opposed the conceptual claims of the greys. In this double-barrelled approach, Oehlen’s overall body of work is made deliberately incoherent, and it becomes impossible to determine any fixed artistic position. Much like the artist himself, Bigote is disruptive, mercurial and mischievous, opening our eyes to the fundamental ambiguities of painting, and leaving us on thrillingly uncertain ground.