Albert Oehlen’s work embodies a loud simultaneity of contrasting forces—a condition that could be read as the perfect visual equivalent to the deafening cacophony that characterizes daily life in the information age. The paintings are strident, intricate, dense, at times plainly vulgar. They are multilayered, but appear to materialize all at once, as explosions of information. They exist in a peculiar suspension of time, like sudden outbursts that have been growing slowly, almost by sedimentation. They appear rushed and immediate, yet they develop by accumulation, like geological formations.
Throughout the 1980s, Oehlen threw himself into painting with so much enthusiasm as to appear suspicious. Not only was he “hungry for pictures” after the starvation imposed by the regime of Conceptual art, he also appeared to be desperately trying to reduce painting to its zero degree, its lowest common denominator. A brutal simplicity informed his early paintings of dinosaurs and naive scenes, so crudely executed as to earn the approval of his soon-to-be-friend and collaborator, the legendarily irreverent Martin Kippenberger, who, standing in front of the work, enthusiastically proclaimed: “It’s not possible to paint worse than that.” Oehlen, for his part, described his method as a kind of homeopathic approach by which he ingurgitated generous quantities of the same poison his work was presumedly fighting against. “Don’t denounce anything; rather put yourself into this embarrassing situation and give it a meaning,” Oehlen posited. “How would it look if I were the villain, or the ugly one, or the stupid one?”
In the first phase of his work, Oehlen taught himself to be stupid as a painter—as Marcel Duchamp would have put it—in an attempt, perhaps, to regain his innocence. In the second part of his career, he perfected the studied carelessness that characterizes much of his painting. By the 1990s, he set himself the challenge of being seen as a serious painter, and consequently embarked on a new series of “post-non-objective” paintings (as he refers to them) that represent a kind of second, and perhaps equally false, start to his career. In these works Oehlen appears both free and carefully sophisticated, practicing what the Mannerists would have called sprezzatura, a certain nonchalance meant to conceal any sense of artfulness—a perfectly calculated spontaneity. The goal is to paint while at the same time denouncing the inadequacy of painting.
Oehlen’s indulgence in the pleasures of paint is always kept in check by what Diedrich Diederichsen has called an “affirmation of impurity.” It is as though these paintings refuse to settle for any established norm: the compositions are on the edge of complete dissolution, just short of falling apart into a muddle of forms; the colors are sordid; and the strokes seem to parody some second-rate manual of Abstract Expressionist moves while also appearing cautiously measured, almost choreographed.
The tempo of these paintings is also mysterious. They were not executed spontaneously, but they do seem to be trying to simulate the speed of an impromptu gesture—an effect that is attained by painting very slowly some of the drips, drops, and strokes that usually would result from improvisation. Oehlen imposes a series of rules and restrictions on his working process. For example, certain colors might be systematically adopted for the finishing touches on all the pieces in a series, while other colors might be completely avoided from the start. Systems and methods take precedence over improvisation: “What was once heroically arbitrary suddenly becomes systematic and boring,” the artist explains. Here, the opposite would also ring true: the prosaic is taken to emphatic dimensions and made strangely sublime. Unlike his predecessors Gerhard Richter and Sigmar Polke, who struggled to make the banal feel important, Oehlen reverses the terms of the equation, making the important feel banal, while constantly confounding the lyrical and the mundane.
There is a cult of complexity in the work, a penchant for density that takes abstraction to vertiginous heights and obscure depths. Perhaps more remarkably, Oehlen imbues his abstract works with a sense of detachment that is one of his most important contributions to contemporary painting. All his work seems to assimilate the grammar of expressionism—with its sound and fury, its clanging and rattling—but cools it down and freezes it. It’s as though expressionism had been captured as a screenshot. This is “expressionism in drag,” as John Kelsey put it.
Unlike many of his predecessors—and this lineage stretches as far back as Kurt Schwitters—Oehlen seems less interested in redeeming painting than in forcing it to come to terms with everything it usually leaves out. That might be his most profound preoccupation: How much can a painting accept before it ceases to be a painting? Up until when is it still a painting? What is its breaking point?
A conflict of forms, images, and ideas agitate the paintings, as they savor their own unresolvable contradictions, as Peter Schjeldahl has written. From this perspective, Oehlen’s paintings can be seen as a form of perceptual gymnastics by which one trains the body, mind, and eyes to sustain ever heavier loads of information and visual noise. Once wrestled with, this unbearable, even atrocious surfeit of forms, lines, and colors resolves—Rubin’s vase–like—into an ostensibly different composition. Oehlen explains: “When you work on a painting for a month, you spend 30 days standing in front of the world’s ugliest picture. In my work, I’m constantly surrounded by the most dreadful pictures. What I see are unbearably ugly tatters, which are then transformed at the last moment, as if by magic, into something beautiful.
Albert Oehlen’s work embodies a loud simultaneity of contrasting forces—a condition that could be read as the perfect visual equivalent to the deafening cacophony that characterizes daily life in the information age. The paintings are strident, intricate, dense, at times plainly vulgar. They are multilayered, but appear to materialize all at once, as explosions of information. They exist in a peculiar suspension of time, like sudden outbursts that have been growing slowly, almost by sedimentation. They appear rushed and immediate, yet they develop by accumulation, like geological formations.
Throughout the 1980s, Oehlen threw himself into painting with so much enthusiasm as to appear suspicious. Not only was he “hungry for pictures” after the starvation imposed by the regime of Conceptual art, he also appeared to be desperately trying to reduce painting to its zero degree, its lowest common denominator. A brutal simplicity informed his early paintings of dinosaurs and naive scenes, so crudely executed as to earn the approval of his soon-to-be-friend and collaborator, the legendarily irreverent Martin Kippenberger, who, standing in front of the work, enthusiastically proclaimed: “It’s not possible to paint worse than that.” Oehlen, for his part, described his method as a kind of homeopathic approach by which he ingurgitated generous quantities of the same poison his work was presumedly fighting against. “Don’t denounce anything; rather put yourself into this embarrassing situation and give it a meaning,” Oehlen posited. “How would it look if I were the villain, or the ugly one, or the stupid one?”
In the first phase of his work, Oehlen taught himself to be stupid as a painter—as Marcel Duchamp would have put it—in an attempt, perhaps, to regain his innocence. In the second part of his career, he perfected the studied carelessness that characterizes much of his painting. By the 1990s, he set himself the challenge of being seen as a serious painter, and consequently embarked on a new series of “post-non-objective” paintings (as he refers to them) that represent a kind of second, and perhaps equally false, start to his career. In these works Oehlen appears both free and carefully sophisticated, practicing what the Mannerists would have called sprezzatura, a certain nonchalance meant to conceal any sense of artfulness—a perfectly calculated spontaneity. The goal is to paint while at the same time denouncing the inadequacy of painting.
Oehlen’s indulgence in the pleasures of paint is always kept in check by what Diedrich Diederichsen has called an “affirmation of impurity.” It is as though these paintings refuse to settle for any established norm: the compositions are on the edge of complete dissolution, just short of falling apart into a muddle of forms; the colors are sordid; and the strokes seem to parody some second-rate manual of Abstract Expressionist moves while also appearing cautiously measured, almost choreographed.
The tempo of these paintings is also mysterious. They were not executed spontaneously, but they do seem to be trying to simulate the speed of an impromptu gesture—an effect that is attained by painting very slowly some of the drips, drops, and strokes that usually would result from improvisation. Oehlen imposes a series of rules and restrictions on his working process. For example, certain colors might be systematically adopted for the finishing touches on all the pieces in a series, while other colors might be completely avoided from the start. Systems and methods take precedence over improvisation: “What was once heroically arbitrary suddenly becomes systematic and boring,” the artist explains. Here, the opposite would also ring true: the prosaic is taken to emphatic dimensions and made strangely sublime. Unlike his predecessors Gerhard Richter and Sigmar Polke, who struggled to make the banal feel important, Oehlen reverses the terms of the equation, making the important feel banal, while constantly confounding the lyrical and the mundane.
There is a cult of complexity in the work, a penchant for density that takes abstraction to vertiginous heights and obscure depths. Perhaps more remarkably, Oehlen imbues his abstract works with a sense of detachment that is one of his most important contributions to contemporary painting. All his work seems to assimilate the grammar of expressionism—with its sound and fury, its clanging and rattling—but cools it down and freezes it. It’s as though expressionism had been captured as a screenshot. This is “expressionism in drag,” as John Kelsey put it.
Unlike many of his predecessors—and this lineage stretches as far back as Kurt Schwitters—Oehlen seems less interested in redeeming painting than in forcing it to come to terms with everything it usually leaves out. That might be his most profound preoccupation: How much can a painting accept before it ceases to be a painting? Up until when is it still a painting? What is its breaking point?
A conflict of forms, images, and ideas agitate the paintings, as they savor their own unresolvable contradictions, as Peter Schjeldahl has written. From this perspective, Oehlen’s paintings can be seen as a form of perceptual gymnastics by which one trains the body, mind, and eyes to sustain ever heavier loads of information and visual noise. Once wrestled with, this unbearable, even atrocious surfeit of forms, lines, and colors resolves—Rubin’s vase–like—into an ostensibly different composition. Oehlen explains: “When you work on a painting for a month, you spend 30 days standing in front of the world’s ugliest picture. In my work, I’m constantly surrounded by the most dreadful pictures. What I see are unbearably ugly tatters, which are then transformed at the last moment, as if by magic, into something beautiful.