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Lot Essay
Fm 3 (2008) belongs to Albert Oehlen’s series of Fingermalerei or ‘finger paintings’, which feature pigment applied using his bare hands. Sweeps of orange, blue, green and pink trace the dance of Oehlen’s palms and fingers across the surface. At the centre is an ovoid form, its apricot tones polished to a glow. It was included in an exhibition of the Fingermalerei at the Emil Schumacher Museum, Hagen, in 2010. The series began two years earlier after Oehlen saw the group show Action Painting at the Fondation Beyeler in Basel, and became newly fascinated by the gestural work of painters such as Willem de Kooning. Some examples feature tangled blurs of colour laid over printed advertisements. Others, such as Fm 3, are set in pristine white space. Their elemental marks, writes Jordan Kantor, seem to dramatise ‘some primary moment of abstraction, when the first artists had an idea that mark-making on a flat picture plane might stand in equivalence to other lived experiences’ (‘Close-up’, Artforum, vol. 49, no. 10, Summer 2011).
During the 1980s, alongside friends including Martin 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 figurative pictures. Towards the end of that decade he turned to abstraction, pulling elements from different canons and playing with process in a way that broke down, demystified and rejuvenated the medium. He has continued to test its limits since, using brushes, fingers, aerosol, collage and digital tools in an eclectic, volatile and subversive body of work that takes the very practice of painting as its central subject.
Oehlen has repeatedly shaken up his practice by imposing different rules to work by. During the 1990s he painted on patterned fabrics, riffing on their printed designs. He used early digital drawing software to make his ‘computer paintings’, which translate the motion of the hand to pixelated lines. Often working in riotous colour, he has also limited himself to grisaille in discrete groups of ‘grey paintings.’ At other times he has chosen his palette according to alphabetical order, or painted versions of the same work fast or slowly. ‘It starts when you’ll go shopping for art supplies’, Oehlen said in 2009. ‘You make decisions, and they’re always the same, like the kind of brushes you buy. And if you’re forced to change something, it gives an insecurity to the work that is very helpful. It makes you find out what you really need’ (in conversation with G. O’Brien, Interview, May 2009, p. 108). The Fingermalerei offered just such a liberating challenge.
These paintings also allowed Oehlen to continue his rigorous dialogue with art history. What does the handmade mark signify in the contemporary age? Can it be understood as a signal of authentic expression, or is it now merely a convention that can only be received in ironic or academic terms? In his own ‘deliberate, very slow way of painting’, Oehlen reflected, ‘… Everything that played a role in action painting was intentionally left out, totally eliminated. My pictures were constructed. And then to be confronted with the term “action” … after my work of the past twenty years … that was finally the moment when I was able to get somewhere with action. When I integrated it into my practice, it became a wholly different story than if I had simply charged at the canvas headfirst in 1988’ (in conversation with A. Klar, in Albert Oehlen: New Paintings, exh. cat., Gagosian Gallery, Los Angeles, 2014, p. 82). Fm 3’s haptic skeins of colour reflect Oehlen’s conception of painting—despite everything he throws at it—as something mysteriously alive, open-ended and continually evolving.
During the 1980s, alongside friends including Martin 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 figurative pictures. Towards the end of that decade he turned to abstraction, pulling elements from different canons and playing with process in a way that broke down, demystified and rejuvenated the medium. He has continued to test its limits since, using brushes, fingers, aerosol, collage and digital tools in an eclectic, volatile and subversive body of work that takes the very practice of painting as its central subject.
Oehlen has repeatedly shaken up his practice by imposing different rules to work by. During the 1990s he painted on patterned fabrics, riffing on their printed designs. He used early digital drawing software to make his ‘computer paintings’, which translate the motion of the hand to pixelated lines. Often working in riotous colour, he has also limited himself to grisaille in discrete groups of ‘grey paintings.’ At other times he has chosen his palette according to alphabetical order, or painted versions of the same work fast or slowly. ‘It starts when you’ll go shopping for art supplies’, Oehlen said in 2009. ‘You make decisions, and they’re always the same, like the kind of brushes you buy. And if you’re forced to change something, it gives an insecurity to the work that is very helpful. It makes you find out what you really need’ (in conversation with G. O’Brien, Interview, May 2009, p. 108). The Fingermalerei offered just such a liberating challenge.
These paintings also allowed Oehlen to continue his rigorous dialogue with art history. What does the handmade mark signify in the contemporary age? Can it be understood as a signal of authentic expression, or is it now merely a convention that can only be received in ironic or academic terms? In his own ‘deliberate, very slow way of painting’, Oehlen reflected, ‘… Everything that played a role in action painting was intentionally left out, totally eliminated. My pictures were constructed. And then to be confronted with the term “action” … after my work of the past twenty years … that was finally the moment when I was able to get somewhere with action. When I integrated it into my practice, it became a wholly different story than if I had simply charged at the canvas headfirst in 1988’ (in conversation with A. Klar, in Albert Oehlen: New Paintings, exh. cat., Gagosian Gallery, Los Angeles, 2014, p. 82). Fm 3’s haptic skeins of colour reflect Oehlen’s conception of painting—despite everything he throws at it—as something mysteriously alive, open-ended and continually evolving.