Untitled (22/87)

Towering two metres in height, Albert Oehlen’s Untitled (22/87) is a riotous implosion of colour and form. It was painted in 1987, the year before the historic trip to Spain with Martin Kippenberger that saw Oehlen’s major turn towards large-scale abstraction: laying the ground for that seminal leap, it stands as a rare early example of this mode within his practice. With its cacophonous palette and disorienting, deliberately incoherent composition, it presents a strident breakdown of painterly norms. Passages of acid yellow and magenta clash among slabs of earthy brown and silver-grey. Oehlen’s brushstrokes travel in all directions, by turns coarse and liquid, heavy and light. Blocks and circles emerge in sketched outlines and looming silhouettes before sinking into obscurity. Dark swathes of umber rain oily drips down the surface; veils of dilute brown also run sideways, Oehlen having rotated the canvas during painting. It is a jarring and compelling spectacle, creaking with layers of ruin and creation. Undermining, critiquing and ultimately revitalising painting in a post-painting world, Oehlen dismantles his medium to expose its beating heart. ‘As long as painting’s refutation can still take the form of painting,’ he claims, ‘painting has not been refuted’ (A. Oehlen, quoted in D. Diederichsen, ‘The Rules of the Game’, Artforum, November 1994, p. 104).

Alongside his friends Martin Kippenberger and Werner Büttner, Oehlen came to prominence as one of the ‘Hetzler boys’ who began showing at Max Hetzler’s gallery in Cologne in the mid-1980s. Armed with boisterous humour and a devil-may-care attitude, these painters partied hard, rejected standard aesthetic values and ridiculed the consumerist excesses of post-war Germany. Playing fast and loose with symbol and subject matter, they embraced the label of ‘bad painting’, creating turbulent, confrontational canvases which—paradoxically—did much to revive a medium whose future seemed menaced by Conceptual and Minimal art. With their irreverence, formal extremism and sharp societal critique, Oehlen’s paintings of this era attacked convention in the raw DIY spirit of punk music, and riffed on existing forms with the harmonic daring of free jazz.

Oehlen’s early works often engaged with figurative motifs as a way of dethroning historical and painterly clichés, and probed his country’s uneasy relationship with images. His shift to abstraction allowed him to get as far away from meaning as possible, allowing a more direct approach to painting as process. Piling multiple actions on top of one another, he created kaleidoscopic, murky miasmas of pigment that seem to quote from every painterly approach at once, defying the most fundamental of pictorial rules and becoming perilously unstable. ‘If it’s a nice composition, a balance of colours and weights, that’s kind of been done a couple of times’, Oehlen has said. ‘So I’m not satisfied with that and I want more, I want problems’ (A. Oehlen in conversation with M. Godfrey, Gagosian Quarterly, 7 April 2021).

Even as it groans beneath the weight of Oehlen’s painterly stress-test, Untitled (22/87) holds on to what he has called the ‘dignity’ of painting: its capacity to exist as an autonomous presence, without illusion, emotional baggage or technical trickery. ‘Whether they’re good or bad, pretty or ugly,’ he says, ‘paintings should maintain themselves without excuses. No magic, no science, no excuses’ (A. Oehlen, quoted in D. Diederichsen, ibid., p. 71). With nowhere left to turn, the painting’s problems are recast in a strangely beautiful light. Its yellows and purples—colours common to Oehlen’s works of this period—glow like otherworldly jewels amid its Old Masterly browns and sepia greys, while at the lower right edge, a pristine corner of emerald green flashes as if from an alternate universe. Wrenching free from the customs and habits of the past, Oehlen makes painting radically unfamiliar, and carves a critical new place for its future.