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Descriptif du lot
In Albert Oehlen’s Untitled (1989), multiple paintings seem to be happening at once. Tendrils, arcs and tongues of burnt umber, white, silver and black overlay and sweep through one another, almost but not quite cohering into recognisable shape. The paint is variously translucent, blurred, metallic and gleaming with resin. Ochre and khaki-coloured washes drift between foreground and background, dripping in different directions. Orthogonal lines create the impression of an interior space; a swathe of emerald green glows at the top of the canvas. Created in 1989—the year after a pivotal trip to Spain with his colleague Martin Kippenberger—the work stems from one of Oehlen’s most acclaimed periods, setting out the radical breakdown, demystification and revitalising of painting that would drive his practice for decades to come.
During the 1980s, alongside friends including Kippenberger, Werner Büttner and Jörg Immendorff, Oehlen was at the centre of what came to be known as the Neue Wilde movement. Working in Hamburg, Berlin and later Cologne, these artists took a transgressive, post-punk approach to the dominant cultural values of their time. Oehlen’s target—at a moment when the medium had been declared dead—was painting. He parodied its decrepitude and tested the boundaries of good taste with slapdash, pseudo-Expressionist pictures of dinosaurs, crude interiors and abject self-portraits. It was not until 1988, when he and Kippenberger retreated to a rented house in Andalusia, that Oehlen tackled abstraction head-on. ‘I always had a wish to become an abstract painter’, he explained. ‘I wanted to reproduce in my own career the classical development in the history of art from figurative to abstract painting … In Spain I made myself free for the project’ (A. Oehlen quoted in A. Sooke, ‘I Wanted My Paintings to Like Me’, The Telegraph, 1 July 2006).
The paintings that ensued, including the present work, are highly distinctive. By pulling elements from different canons and playing with process—including painting areas of the canvas at different speeds, viscosities and orientations—Oehlen sought to purge and clarify, producing autonomous works that broke through the usual laws of visual language. He discarded illusion, theory, biographical baggage and technical trickery. While art-historically self-conscious, these paintings gained what he called an ‘arbitrariness’ that made them entirely novel, and able to stand on their own terms. ‘Whether they’re good or bad, pretty or ugly,’ he said, ‘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, pp. 70, 71).
The present work’s layers deliberately reveal its workings. As Oehlen riffs through a wide palette of references—from an Old Masterly palette to echoes of biomorphic surrealism and gestural abstraction—different velocities and contrasts develop. Conventional uniformity cannot take hold, and the painting itself becomes a new and unfamiliar object. ‘If cubism attempted to render the object in time and space through the imposition of multiple specular viewpoints,’ observes Martin Clark, ‘Oehlen appears to imagine the painting in several parallel universes’ (M. Clark, ‘Abstract Painting Must Die Now’, in Albert Oehlen: I Will Always Champion Good Painting, exh. cat. Whitechapel Gallery, London 2006, p. 58). This montage-like approach would continue to inform Oehlen’s later explorations, including his fabric and computer paintings, where printed patterns or pixelated lines morph in and out of sync with his own abstract brushwork.
The sinuous, branching forms at the heart of the present work also relate to Oehlen’s ‘tree’ paintings. These have emerged in various permutations since 1988, most recently in several stark, monochromatic series of the 2010s. In search at first of a kitsch, picture-postcard motif to deflate, Oehlen soon realised that the tree’s basic structure—vertical at the centre, with progressively narrow lines extending outward—was analogous to a painter’s approach to the canvas, not knowing where his brush would lead. Although constrained by certain rules, the branches and roots could be wandering and chaotic, able to make any move: in this way, they were models of abstraction itself. In the primordial space of the present work, we see Oehlen’s radical, revelatory freedom take shape as he tests the limits of painting.
During the 1980s, alongside friends including Kippenberger, Werner Büttner and Jörg Immendorff, Oehlen was at the centre of what came to be known as the Neue Wilde movement. Working in Hamburg, Berlin and later Cologne, these artists took a transgressive, post-punk approach to the dominant cultural values of their time. Oehlen’s target—at a moment when the medium had been declared dead—was painting. He parodied its decrepitude and tested the boundaries of good taste with slapdash, pseudo-Expressionist pictures of dinosaurs, crude interiors and abject self-portraits. It was not until 1988, when he and Kippenberger retreated to a rented house in Andalusia, that Oehlen tackled abstraction head-on. ‘I always had a wish to become an abstract painter’, he explained. ‘I wanted to reproduce in my own career the classical development in the history of art from figurative to abstract painting … In Spain I made myself free for the project’ (A. Oehlen quoted in A. Sooke, ‘I Wanted My Paintings to Like Me’, The Telegraph, 1 July 2006).
The paintings that ensued, including the present work, are highly distinctive. By pulling elements from different canons and playing with process—including painting areas of the canvas at different speeds, viscosities and orientations—Oehlen sought to purge and clarify, producing autonomous works that broke through the usual laws of visual language. He discarded illusion, theory, biographical baggage and technical trickery. While art-historically self-conscious, these paintings gained what he called an ‘arbitrariness’ that made them entirely novel, and able to stand on their own terms. ‘Whether they’re good or bad, pretty or ugly,’ he said, ‘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, pp. 70, 71).
The present work’s layers deliberately reveal its workings. As Oehlen riffs through a wide palette of references—from an Old Masterly palette to echoes of biomorphic surrealism and gestural abstraction—different velocities and contrasts develop. Conventional uniformity cannot take hold, and the painting itself becomes a new and unfamiliar object. ‘If cubism attempted to render the object in time and space through the imposition of multiple specular viewpoints,’ observes Martin Clark, ‘Oehlen appears to imagine the painting in several parallel universes’ (M. Clark, ‘Abstract Painting Must Die Now’, in Albert Oehlen: I Will Always Champion Good Painting, exh. cat. Whitechapel Gallery, London 2006, p. 58). This montage-like approach would continue to inform Oehlen’s later explorations, including his fabric and computer paintings, where printed patterns or pixelated lines morph in and out of sync with his own abstract brushwork.
The sinuous, branching forms at the heart of the present work also relate to Oehlen’s ‘tree’ paintings. These have emerged in various permutations since 1988, most recently in several stark, monochromatic series of the 2010s. In search at first of a kitsch, picture-postcard motif to deflate, Oehlen soon realised that the tree’s basic structure—vertical at the centre, with progressively narrow lines extending outward—was analogous to a painter’s approach to the canvas, not knowing where his brush would lead. Although constrained by certain rules, the branches and roots could be wandering and chaotic, able to make any move: in this way, they were models of abstraction itself. In the primordial space of the present work, we see Oehlen’s radical, revelatory freedom take shape as he tests the limits of painting.