FN 31

Albert Oehlen's FN 31, is a monumental painting that embraces many of the challenges confronting art in the 1970s and early 80s - an era characterised in Germany by the clash between art, ideology and politics. As an artist, Oehlen emerges side by side with Martin Kippenberger, as they explored a new ways of making art that would transform the public perception of the artist. Regarding all matter as possible fodder for the traditionally 'high art' of painting, they used the language of painting and the canvas as the medium by which to communicate their radicalism and as a platform to reflect the events of their time.

With FN 31, any semblance of figuration is deliberately obscured, but faintly recognisable elements, such as the American flag, are left to tantalise the viewer and conjure myriad political and artistic references. Oehlen's vigorous brushstrokes and multicoloured layers of paint result in the de-familiarisation of both subject and object, in a way that more than borders on abstraction. In doing so, the possible identification of any detailed and elaborate figuration is distorted, so that Oehlen has created a painting of vanishing and re-surfacing images shadowed and highlighted by his own choice of anti-aestheticism.

Through FN 31, Oehlen appears to have achieved a non-artistic style, Meaning of content and meaning of form are subordinated to the overall intention of Oehlen's paintings, and it is in this blurred result that he finds his artistic domain.