“BBQ” belongs to Albert Oehlen’s cycle of grey paintings, a series that the artist has periodically returned to as an exercise in self-discipline.
Every few years, starting from 1997, Oehlen has forced himself to paint a group of paintings by using only the color grey, limiting both the chromatic range and the techniques available to himself, avoiding the use of collage or computer printing which he had adopted in many of his coeval works.
Oehlen has described working in grey as a way to cultivate a new hunger for color: a process of restraint that offers the opportunity to return to color with renewed excitement and transformed perspective – a kind of self-enforced lent, carried out before an explosive carnival… Or a kind of self-imposed quarantine, if you like.
The works resulting from this chromatic diet are both drastically restrained and beautifully imaginative – freedom and discipline in perfect balance…
“BBQ” also strangely resembles Gerhard Richter’s much discussed first photo-based painting, “Tisch”, 1962 – the painting that famously starts off Richter’s catalogue raisonne, as the foundational image of the many myths surrounding the career of the influential German artist. Richter’s philosophical reflections on the limits of representation are turned upside down in Oehlen’s hands. Richter painted a minimalist designer table and then blurred it in a gesture that has inspired rivers of inks and discussions about photography and ontology. Oehlen, more modestly and more absurdly, paints an American barbecue and turns it into a strange virtuosic rhapsody in grey. Richter makes the banal feel important, Oehlen makes the important feel banal. Both find the lyrical in the mundane
“BBQ” belongs to Albert Oehlen’s cycle of grey paintings, a series that the artist has periodically returned to as an exercise in self-discipline.
Every few years, starting from 1997, Oehlen has forced himself to paint a group of paintings by using only the color grey, limiting both the chromatic range and the techniques available to himself, avoiding the use of collage or computer printing which he had adopted in many of his coeval works.
Oehlen has described working in grey as a way to cultivate a new hunger for color: a process of restraint that offers the opportunity to return to color with renewed excitement and transformed perspective – a kind of self-enforced lent, carried out before an explosive carnival… Or a kind of self-imposed quarantine, if you like.
The works resulting from this chromatic diet are both drastically restrained and beautifully imaginative – freedom and discipline in perfect balance…
“BBQ” also strangely resembles Gerhard Richter’s much discussed first photo-based painting, “Tisch”, 1962 – the painting that famously starts off Richter’s catalogue raisonne, as the foundational image of the many myths surrounding the career of the influential German artist. Richter’s philosophical reflections on the limits of representation are turned upside down in Oehlen’s hands. Richter painted a minimalist designer table and then blurred it in a gesture that has inspired rivers of inks and discussions about photography and ontology. Oehlen, more modestly and more absurdly, paints an American barbecue and turns it into a strange virtuosic rhapsody in grey. Richter makes the banal feel important, Oehlen makes the important feel banal. Both find the lyrical in the mundane