Rendered in an explosive palette, Albert Oehlen’s Untitled (2004) is imbued with the anarchic spirit that has characterised the artist’s oeuvre since its earliest beginnings. Marking his sensational return to pure painting after an extended period of experimentation with digital manipulation, the present work belongs to an important series of paintings that Oehlen made in the mid-2000s, in which he placed an idiosyncratic melee of figurative and abstract shapes against a white background. This was a new approach for the artist, who has explained: “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 cited in: Hans Werner Holzwarth, Ed., Albert Oehlen, Cologne 2009, p. 412). Exhibited at Thomas Ammann Replica Handbags , Zurich, in the year of its execution, Untitled is a mesmerising example of this phase of Oehlen’s mature practice.

In Untitled, moments of detailed precision blend with passages of raw fluidity and dispersion to encapsulate the combination of spontaneity and control that has come to characterise Oehlen’s work from this period. Oehlen first began experimenting with abstract painting at the start of the 1990s, developing a hallmark style which he has playfully dubbed “post-non-representational painting” (Albert Oehlen cited in: Charles Harrison and Paul Woods, Eds., Art in Theory 1900-2000: An Anthology of Changing Ideas, Oxford 2003, p. 1164). Exemplified by the present work, this style presents an ostensibly abstract idiom that never fully abandons figuration. The result is a composition brimming with endless tip-of-the-tongue allusions that seem to evaporate into a grey and clouded haze. This grey haze seeps quite literally across the canvas of Untitled, misting over kaleidoscopic colours and shapes, as if reifying the thick fog of t.mes and memory. In this respect, Oehlen’s technique is evocative of Gerhard Richter’s blurring or obfuscation of photorealistic imagery, as epitomised by the first work in his catalogue raisonné, Tisch (1962; Busch-Reisinger Museum, Harvard Art Museums, Cambridge, Mass.). Similarly exploring the relationship between figuration and abstraction, Oehlen’s Untitled plays with the concept of erasure to challenge the very precepts of image-making.

Throughout his career, Oehlen has imposed rules and limitations upon his painterly practice in order to spark creativity and instigate new bodies of work. From reducing his palette to three colours and working in muted grisaille, to producing art from computers and collaged advertising material, Oehlen has ceaselessly tested and challenged the conventions of painting. In the present work, Oehlen deploys de Kooning-esque abstract and figurative motifs against a bright-white background. The effect, as curator Bonnie Clearwater has explained, is entrancing: “Not only does Oehlen introduce fragments of representational images in inconsistent scales, but he also varies the size of the abstract units in a painting: the relative size of each shape moves the viewer’s attention towards, away from, and across the picture plane in rapid succession. The figurative elements exist without dominating the canvas. At first glance, the paintings appear purely abstract. Only after the viewer has spent some t.mes with these works do the figurative elements reveal themselves” (Bonnie Clearwater, 'I Know Whom you Showed Last Summer' in: Op. cit., p. 422). Indeed, across the entirety of Untitled’s dramatic composition, isolated vignettes and moments of figurative depiction emerge from the background, only to be subsumed by passages of diaphanous paint. One can observe architectural structures, spectral silhouettes and, to the centre right of the canvas, an object resembling a pocket-watch which seems to serve as a Dalí-esque reminder of the ephemerality of t.mes .

In the 1980s, Oehlen’s practice was characterised first and foremost by rebellion. Known alongside his perennial conspirator Martin Kippenberger as the enfant terrible of the Cologne art scene, Oehlen initially set out to undermine the German art establishment with deliberately crude and contentious works which he self-titled the ‘bad paintings’. By the t.mes the present composition was made, his work had progressed from this singular and cursory standpoint into the inquisitive, multi-faceted and thought-provoking practice for which he is known today. At its core, however, there remains a seditious and unorthodox element to Oehlen’s work: “I am convinced that I cannot achieve beauty via a direct route: that can only be the result of deliberation,” he writes; “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.mes ans working with something where your predecessors would have said, ‘You can’t do that’. First you take a step toward ugliness and then, somehow or other, you wind up where it’s beautiful” (Albert Oehlen cited in: Exh. Cat., Bonn, Kunstmuseum Bonn, Albert Oehlen, 2012, p. 71). With its intoxicating cadences and rhythmic potency, Untitled wholly encapsulates Oehlen’s ability to create beautiful works of art through a rejection of the pre-existing expectations and conventions of painting.