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Lot Essay
Seemingly spontaneous eruptions of lineation intersperse large areas of blurred smearings of pigment amid an electric array of colors ranging from iridescent shades of blue, red, green and pink to organic browns and russets in Albert Ohelen’s striking Ohne Titel. Here, the constantly metamorphosing enfant terrible of the art world engages in an intricate play of painterly fraying and contracting, juxtaposing agglomerations and proliferations of his medium in an idiosyncratic, iconoclastic pursuit of painting’s renewal. As the artist explains his revolutionary practice, “I am convinced that I cannot achieve beauty via a direct route; that can only be the result of deliberation. Otherwise, we would be back at the pure sounds that create happiness—which I don’t believe in. That’s the interesting thing about art: that somehow, you use your material to make something that results in something beautiful, via a path that no one has yet trodden. That means working with something that is improbable, where your predecessors would have said, ‘You can’t do that.’ First take a step toward ugliness and then, somehow or another, you wind up where it’s beautiful” (A. Oehlen, quoted in C. Schreier, “Storm Damage—Albert Oehlen’s Painting as Visual Stress Test,” in Albert Oehlen, ed. S. Berg, exh. cat., Kunstmuseum Bonn, 2012, p. 73).
In Ohne Titel, we witness the German artist attempting to reconstruct the possibility of painting following decades where the future of the medium had seemed extinguished. Rejecting the orthodoxies of the past, Oehlen mingles abstraction and figuration together, purposefully pursuing an unaesthetic result so as to attain a new paradigm of beauty. The sensual delight of his linear elements here recalls Willem de Kooning, while his organization of color and composition confronts convention, rejecting the principle of authorship. The artist first approached painting from a place of deep skepticism, as one of the Junge Wilde artists who developed radical approaches to the medium. Along with artists such as Martin Kippenberger and Rainer Fetting, Oehlen first began to paint in order to critique the practice. After much experimentation, he discovered a dialectic of renewal in a radical new mode of painting where each brushstroke and dapple of color must assert itself directly as what it is. As Oehlen describes, “the formal encumbrances and annoyances that a work of art can endure define its legacy” (A. Oehlen, quoted in ibid., p. 73).
Born in Krefeld, Germany, in 1954, Oehlen enrolled in art school in the late 1970s, a time when painting appeared to be at the point of exhaustion and was widely dismissed by his teachers and colleagues. Oehlen quickly fell in with the avant-garde, studying briefly with the legendary Joseph Beyes before learning under Sigmar Polke. Oehlen became a leading light of the generation who sought to reanimate painting, his milieu including Gerhard Richter, Blinky Palermo, and others along with Kippenberger, Oehlen’s great collaborator.
Following his early figurative self-portraits, Oehlen initially began his abstracted paintings after sharing a house with Kippenberger in Spain, where he developed a profound interest in paint’s innate problematics. The development of his abstracted style emerged, he describes, because “I saw myself as abstract” (A. Oehlen, quoted in M. Hudson, “Albert Oehlen with Mark Hudson”, The Brooklyn Rail, April 2024, online [accessed 22 October 2025]). He approached the abstract tradition from the vantage point of its “cliches,” working to challenge its narrative tradition promulgated from the cult of Pollock and Rothko. Thus, the suggestions of figuration latent within Ohne Titel rejects this legacy of formal purity in favor of a more liberated and conflated style which is neither controlled nor anti-form. Here, he combines the experiments of the past with a drive toward future development, layering pleasure, humor, and elegance with a sense of anger, ugliness, and brutality. With the present work, Oehlen achieves the sense of transcendence so aptly described of his paintings by the historian Anne Pontégnie: “at the heart of the storm, where you know you are alive, it becomes possible to paint” (A. Pontégnie, “The History of Abstraction Seemed Finished,” in Albert Oehlen, exh. cat., Galerie Max Hetzler Berlin, 2011, p. 9).
In Ohne Titel, we witness the German artist attempting to reconstruct the possibility of painting following decades where the future of the medium had seemed extinguished. Rejecting the orthodoxies of the past, Oehlen mingles abstraction and figuration together, purposefully pursuing an unaesthetic result so as to attain a new paradigm of beauty. The sensual delight of his linear elements here recalls Willem de Kooning, while his organization of color and composition confronts convention, rejecting the principle of authorship. The artist first approached painting from a place of deep skepticism, as one of the Junge Wilde artists who developed radical approaches to the medium. Along with artists such as Martin Kippenberger and Rainer Fetting, Oehlen first began to paint in order to critique the practice. After much experimentation, he discovered a dialectic of renewal in a radical new mode of painting where each brushstroke and dapple of color must assert itself directly as what it is. As Oehlen describes, “the formal encumbrances and annoyances that a work of art can endure define its legacy” (A. Oehlen, quoted in ibid., p. 73).
Born in Krefeld, Germany, in 1954, Oehlen enrolled in art school in the late 1970s, a time when painting appeared to be at the point of exhaustion and was widely dismissed by his teachers and colleagues. Oehlen quickly fell in with the avant-garde, studying briefly with the legendary Joseph Beyes before learning under Sigmar Polke. Oehlen became a leading light of the generation who sought to reanimate painting, his milieu including Gerhard Richter, Blinky Palermo, and others along with Kippenberger, Oehlen’s great collaborator.
Following his early figurative self-portraits, Oehlen initially began his abstracted paintings after sharing a house with Kippenberger in Spain, where he developed a profound interest in paint’s innate problematics. The development of his abstracted style emerged, he describes, because “I saw myself as abstract” (A. Oehlen, quoted in M. Hudson, “Albert Oehlen with Mark Hudson”, The Brooklyn Rail, April 2024, online [accessed 22 October 2025]). He approached the abstract tradition from the vantage point of its “cliches,” working to challenge its narrative tradition promulgated from the cult of Pollock and Rothko. Thus, the suggestions of figuration latent within Ohne Titel rejects this legacy of formal purity in favor of a more liberated and conflated style which is neither controlled nor anti-form. Here, he combines the experiments of the past with a drive toward future development, layering pleasure, humor, and elegance with a sense of anger, ugliness, and brutality. With the present work, Oehlen achieves the sense of transcendence so aptly described of his paintings by the historian Anne Pontégnie: “at the heart of the storm, where you know you are alive, it becomes possible to paint” (A. Pontégnie, “The History of Abstraction Seemed Finished,” in Albert Oehlen, exh. cat., Galerie Max Hetzler Berlin, 2011, p. 9).