Untitled

The German painter Albert Oehlen is celebrated for his boisterous, kaleidoscopic paintings, which simultaneously stretch and challenge the conventions of his medium. The monumental Untitled (2017) is no exception. Uneven strips of flat, brilliant colour are stacked in two columns, on a field of pristine white. This crisp-edged framework is overpainted with disruptive brushstrokes which emerge from all directions. There are phantasmic green and white forms, so lightly painted that they seem to hover above the rows of colour. Earthy duns and unctuous beiges trickle down and across the canvas—a sign that Oehlen has rotated it as he works—while a salmon-pink patch looks as if it has leapt out of place. A precise row of small squares bisects the picture plane, reminiscent of the pixelations in Oehlen’s trailblazing ‘computer paintings’ of the 1990s. The gestural smears hark back further still to the densely-wrought quagmires of his confrontational early work, where Oehlen often concealed his processes. Yet the present painting has an airiness and openness: Oehlen lifts the curtain on his techniques. In 2017, it was prominently featured in the career-spanning solo exhibition Ö at the National Museum of Fine Arts of Havana, Cuba.

Oehlen’s chromatic lattice resembles at once a very ordered painter’s palette and a crooked colour swatch. It invokes the ‘colour chart’ paintings of his fellow German artist Gerhard Richter, first created in 1965 as a reaction to Pop art and developed into an exploration of non-figurative composition. Oehlen casts aside the rational objectivity of Richter in favour of something looser and more expressive. A musician before turning to art, he has long been inspired by both the radical energy of punk and the improvisational extremities of jazz. ‘I see it this way: it’s the confluence of earnestness and ridiculousness that allows the artist to run riot’, he has said. ‘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’, in Albert Oehlen: Home and Garden, exh. cat. New Museum, New York 2015, p. 102).

Untitled furthers Oehlen’s career-long propensity for untamed expression. When he first came to prominence in the mid-1980s, he was known as a charismatic, hard-partying enfant terrible. Alongside his friends Martin Kippenberger and Werner Büttner—who all exhibited in Cologne’s Galerie Max Hetzler—he thumbed his nose at both West Germany’s sober, consumerist society and an international art world that prioritised abstraction and conceptualism over traditional painterly pursuits. All three artists championed ‘bad painting’: work which initially appears unsightly or awkward in style or subject matter. ‘Whether they’re good or bad, pretty or ugly’, Oehlen explains, ‘paintings should maintain themselves without excuses. No magic, no science, no excuses’ (A. Oehlen, quoted in D. Diederichsen, ‘The Rules of the Game’, Artforum, November 1994, p. 71).

Oehlen has since painted everything from collaged supermarket advertisements to spindly, silhouette-like trees. His work melds its irreverence and social critique with a protean mastery of painterly skills. He often approaches the canvas as if convening a scientific experiment: Oehlen both shatters the rules of painting and creates new worlds. ‘You might,’ he says, ‘put your paint in alphabetical order and say, “I’m only using A through K today.” It makes no sense, but you wonder what will happen on the canvas’ (A. Oehlen, quoted in B. Powers, ‘“Humans Will Have the Last Word”: A Talk With Albert Oehlen’, Art News, 24 August 2015). Untitled is a compelling exemplar of Oehlen’s deconstructive, searching and ceaselessly innovative approach.