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拍品专文
‘I like very much if you do things that seem to be forbidden and seem to be impossible, like a test of courage’ — A. Oehlen
‘I keep nothing clean’ — A. Oehlen
Albert Oehlen’s Untitled (1990) confronts the viewer with a mesmeric profusion of painterly forms. Earthy tones body forth a cacophony of abstract fields, while latent figuration struggles into view in a vast outlined hand, whose kinesic digits remark wryly upon the painting’s gestural smears and expressive drips. Paint trickles disorientingly upwards or accrues in tactile impasto; veils of resinous translucency are offset by a beautiful mass of stainless silver. Dating from shortly after the artist’s 1988 trip to Spain with Martin Kippenberger which saw Oehlen’s groundbreaking turn to large-scale abstraction, the work clashes disparate traditional modes in a form of thrilling creative ruin. Oehlen deliberately undermines the practice of painting to the point of breakdown. Questioning the central ideas of representation, composition and colour, he asserts an acute conceptual attitude from a paradoxical position: a critique of painting is posed from within the medium itself. Hovering between self-expression and commentary, Untitled bears witness to an extraordinary practice of meta-painting, confounding and compelling in a riotous implosion of aesthetics, conjuring painting’s most turbulent existential dilemmas to the surface.
Taught by Sigmar Polke and rising to prominence in the 1980s alongside the provocative Kippenberger, Oehlen’s cerebral and subversive art has always been couched in an irreverent and humorous post-Punk sensibility. ‘I don’t think you can really, seriously – or philosophically – try to find out what it is that a painting does to you,’ he has said. ‘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 quoted in Glenn O’Brien, ‘Albert Oehlen,’ Interview Magazine, January 2011). Indeed, his explosive excesses of form and colour redefined what was possible in paint. These boisterous abstracts defied the very notions of what is acceptable as painting, even while rejuvenating a medium that had been declining in prominence since the 1970s. ‘I see it this way: it’s the confluence of earnestness and ridiculousness that allows the artist to run riot. It’s comparable to a classic jazz soloist. He runs riot within his harmony and stretches it as far as it can go’ (A. Oehlen, quoted in ‘Fredi Fischli and Niels Olsen in conversation with Albert Oehlen’, Albert Oehlen: Home and Garden, exh. cat., New Museum, New York, 2015, p. 102).
Having started his career with figurative works, Oehlen’s foray into abstraction was accompanied by a switch from acrylic to oil paint. He recalls that ‘the reason why I went to oil was mainly because I didn’t control it. I was looking for the insecurity of it’ (Albert Oehlen quoted in Glenn O’Brien, ‘Albert Oehlen,’ Interview Magazine, January 2011). Where others might look for security, the instability Oehlen finds in working with oil further hands the reigns over to paint itself; the primordial hues and tumescent shapes in Untitled create an energetic miasma that commits a sort of artistic mutiny. The hand could configure the emergent elemental power of the medium, or the painter reaching hopelessly out of the all-consuming quicksand of his own work. This is a work of conflict and irresolution, even as its elements reluctantly combine. ‘I define a vocabulary of qualities that I want to see brought together: delicacy and coarseness, color and vagueness, and, underlying them all, a base note of hysteria’ (A. Oehlen, quoted in ‘Fredi Fischli and Niels Olsen in conversation with Albert Oehlen’, Albert Oehlen: Home and Garden, exh. cat., New Museum, New York, 2015, p. 99). In Untitled, Oehlen’s distinctive recipe results in a bubbling cauldron of a work that is chimeric, unsettling and intoxicating unlike anything ever seen before in paint.
‘I keep nothing clean’ — A. Oehlen
Albert Oehlen’s Untitled (1990) confronts the viewer with a mesmeric profusion of painterly forms. Earthy tones body forth a cacophony of abstract fields, while latent figuration struggles into view in a vast outlined hand, whose kinesic digits remark wryly upon the painting’s gestural smears and expressive drips. Paint trickles disorientingly upwards or accrues in tactile impasto; veils of resinous translucency are offset by a beautiful mass of stainless silver. Dating from shortly after the artist’s 1988 trip to Spain with Martin Kippenberger which saw Oehlen’s groundbreaking turn to large-scale abstraction, the work clashes disparate traditional modes in a form of thrilling creative ruin. Oehlen deliberately undermines the practice of painting to the point of breakdown. Questioning the central ideas of representation, composition and colour, he asserts an acute conceptual attitude from a paradoxical position: a critique of painting is posed from within the medium itself. Hovering between self-expression and commentary, Untitled bears witness to an extraordinary practice of meta-painting, confounding and compelling in a riotous implosion of aesthetics, conjuring painting’s most turbulent existential dilemmas to the surface.
Taught by Sigmar Polke and rising to prominence in the 1980s alongside the provocative Kippenberger, Oehlen’s cerebral and subversive art has always been couched in an irreverent and humorous post-Punk sensibility. ‘I don’t think you can really, seriously – or philosophically – try to find out what it is that a painting does to you,’ he has said. ‘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 quoted in Glenn O’Brien, ‘Albert Oehlen,’ Interview Magazine, January 2011). Indeed, his explosive excesses of form and colour redefined what was possible in paint. These boisterous abstracts defied the very notions of what is acceptable as painting, even while rejuvenating a medium that had been declining in prominence since the 1970s. ‘I see it this way: it’s the confluence of earnestness and ridiculousness that allows the artist to run riot. It’s comparable to a classic jazz soloist. He runs riot within his harmony and stretches it as far as it can go’ (A. Oehlen, quoted in ‘Fredi Fischli and Niels Olsen in conversation with Albert Oehlen’, Albert Oehlen: Home and Garden, exh. cat., New Museum, New York, 2015, p. 102).
Having started his career with figurative works, Oehlen’s foray into abstraction was accompanied by a switch from acrylic to oil paint. He recalls that ‘the reason why I went to oil was mainly because I didn’t control it. I was looking for the insecurity of it’ (Albert Oehlen quoted in Glenn O’Brien, ‘Albert Oehlen,’ Interview Magazine, January 2011). Where others might look for security, the instability Oehlen finds in working with oil further hands the reigns over to paint itself; the primordial hues and tumescent shapes in Untitled create an energetic miasma that commits a sort of artistic mutiny. The hand could configure the emergent elemental power of the medium, or the painter reaching hopelessly out of the all-consuming quicksand of his own work. This is a work of conflict and irresolution, even as its elements reluctantly combine. ‘I define a vocabulary of qualities that I want to see brought together: delicacy and coarseness, color and vagueness, and, underlying them all, a base note of hysteria’ (A. Oehlen, quoted in ‘Fredi Fischli and Niels Olsen in conversation with Albert Oehlen’, Albert Oehlen: Home and Garden, exh. cat., New Museum, New York, 2015, p. 99). In Untitled, Oehlen’s distinctive recipe results in a bubbling cauldron of a work that is chimeric, unsettling and intoxicating unlike anything ever seen before in paint.