Executed on a captivating scale and in an intensely vibrant palette of colors, Albert Oehlen’s In der Kurve from 1998 typifies the artist’s signature visual lexicon, which slips gracefully between abstraction and figuration. Having moved to abstraction in the early 1990s, the present work epitomizes what Oehlen playfully dubs “post-non-representational painting,” using an abstract idiom and aesthetic but never fully abandoning figuration. (Albert Oehlen quoted in: Charles Harrison and Paul Wood, Eds., Art in Theory 1900-2000: An Anthology of Changing Ideas, Oxford 2003, p. 1164) Seemingly abstract shapes are set against a white backdrop, encouraging the viewer to attempt to decipher and decode them as objects and figures. This was an entirely novel approach for an artist who has never feared radical change: “I had never composed a painting; that was something I didn’t want to bother with. You grease the whole canvas evenly anyway. But now I’m starting to ask myself: why shouldn’t I also profit from the beneficial effect that a white background can have on the viewer.” (Albert Oehlen quoted in: Hans Werner Holzwarth, Ed., Albert Oehlen, Cologne 2009, p. 412)

Of course, in many instances there truly is nothing to decode and the shapes are simply abstract. Any recognition is reliant on the viewer spending sufficient t.mes with the piece to truly see it, and even then, such is the nature of Oehlen’s practice that they can never be certain whether they are right or wrong in their deductions. If there is method to madness, it is to recoil, stroke by stroke, from conventional elegance, strangling one stylistic grace after another. The artist has said that he has always been fascinated by American Action painting and its histrionic mode of pictorial rhetoric, and routinely cites Willem de Kooning as a hero, but any debt owed is a superficial and backhanded one. Through Expressionist brushwork, Surrealist gestures and deliberate amateurism, Oehlen engages with the history of painting, pushing its essential components of color, gesture, motion and t.mes to bold new extremes, resulting in a reaction rather than an action.

Unlike many artists of his generation Oehlen’s work is not rooted in theory but rather in its capacity to interact with his audience. Like his perennial co-conspirator Martin Kippenberger, Oehlen demands a reaction, but unlike Kippenberger, who allows his audience to stop and delight in the ribald, ironic, pathos-ridden universe that he inhabits, Oehlen demands that they go one step further. The works are not simply aesthetic. He explains, "I want to make beautiful paintings. But I don’t make beautiful paintings by putting beautiful paint on a canvas with a beautiful motif. It just doesn’t work. I expect my paintings to be strong and surprising. When I see a painting that knocks me off my feet, I say 'How could he do that? How did he dare?' That’s beauty." (Albert Oehlen quoted in: Alastair Sooke, ‘I want my paintings to like me’, The Telegraph, 1 July 2006, online) Not unlike the work of American Color Field painters such as Mark Rothko and Barnett Newman, the experience of space, scale and color are pivotal to the work. However, Oehlen’s challenge to the viewer is not solely to experience the immersive and expansive canvas, but to recognize the forms within.

Looping lines of tender pinks and green intermingle with black crisscross amid vivid washes of color, running through hazy pallor to deep, vivid turbulences. Set on top of a white background with spots reminiscent of Sigmar Polke’s Rasterbilder, Oehlen has applied forms painted variously using a spraycan, roller and brush, conjuring textures that range from hard-edged to vaporous, linking the work to his revolutionary Computer Paintings, which the artist began in 1990. The work’s layers of colors, flashes and hues create a distinct pictorial depth; there is a sense of system, of cables or powerlines inside a mechanism burst open to reveal its workings. Indeed, this is just what constitutes Oehlen’s practice at large. Undermining, critiquing and ultimately revitalizing painting in a post-painting world, Oehlen dismantles his medium to expose inner working of his practice.

Artist

Albert Oehlen