Untitled

One of the most important painters to come of age at the end of the 20th century, Albert Oehlen was at the forefront of a group of young artists who breathed new life into the venerable world of abstraction. Painted in 2014, Untitled (2014) is a large-scale and painterly example executed at the pinnacle of the artist’s career, perfectly exhibiting his unique and ruthless commitment to the action of painting and the continued legacy of abstraction in contemporary art. “I always had a wish to become an abstract painter,” Oehlen explained. “I wanted to reproduce in my own career the classical development in the history of art from figurative to abstract painting. But I wasn’t ready to make the change before 1988” (A. Oehlen, quoted in A. Stooke, “I Wanted My Paintings to Like Me," The Telegraph, July 1, 2006). By selectively choosing to route his own oeuvre through historical styles and into abstraction, Oehlen instilled his work with myriad influences while still remaining true to his individualism. Works like Untitled speak to the artist’s unwavering commitment to the formal aspects of painting and abstraction, a commitment that helped to bolster and cement Oehlen’s place in the highest echelon of painters in the twenty-first century.
Untitled is one of a suite of paintings with which storied German dealer Max Hetzler debuted at the Paris outpost of his gallery in 2014. Here, two conjoined elements halve the painting’s composition, with the upper and lower sections referring to—and providing balance for—each other. There is the suggestion of mirroring and reversal along both the horizontal and vertical axes, as the colorful melee of brushwork coalesces into two bodies of color. The work utilizes a variety of linear qualities, pigments, and all manners of mark-making as the two focal points are active clusters of what Oehlen has referred to previously as “sharp lines and clotting and doodles and expansions. The whole thing that is going on there, the fraying, the elongation, linking, smudging, denying…” working with, and against, one another in productive tension (A. Oehlen in R. Goetz, Celebration, Frankfurt am Main, 1999, p. 185).
When considering Oehlen’s career, it is useful to view his distinct bodies of work as operating less in a progressive succession with one leading to another, instead they are a series of secessions in which the artist separates himself from that which has become familiar to, or expected of, him. In the same year that Untitled was exhibited in Paris, Daniel Baumann wrote that “as early as 1986 the Austrian linguist Martin Prinzhorn suggested that Oehlen’s art refuses the simple and unambiguous production of meaning, while at the same time playing with our desire for it…” (D. Baumann, Albert Oehlen: New Paintings, Beverly Hills, 2014, p.42). Untitled creates its own context, which is to say that it seeks to exist independently from any imposed theoretical interpretations (including standard tropes of expression), insisting instead to verify the position of its creator rather than a historical trajectory.
Curator Mark Godfrey notes that in Oehlen’s practice, “where there are brushstrokes, they are rarely the ballsy heroic gestures of a Franz Kline or a late 1950s Willem de Kooning (such as Merritt Parkway [1959]),” going on to describe the marks as more relaxed (M. Godfrey in Albert Oehlen: Home and Garden, New York, 2015, p. 50). This corresponds to Oehlen’s temperament at play in Untitled: he both complicates the delicate and the punk with optical and material forms taking on lives of their own. The work proves itself as confident, self-satisfying, and curious.
The complexity of Oehlen’s work is fully exercised—and evident—in a work such as Untitled. In that the work verifies itself, the history of the artist (and his positions) simultaneously runs through it and are tangled by it. When put in dialogue with Untitled, the artist’s Tree Paintings of the early 1990s—with their rhizomatic logics, multiple lines of symmetry, and restrained palettes— and the black-and-white Computer Paintings of the early and mid-2000s seem to be intellectual fore-bearers of this 2014 work and those others made at the time.
There is a common sensibility Oehlen shares with other landmark artist-provocateurs that first came to the public eye in the 1980s and 1990s, such as Julian Schnabel, Werner Büttner, Christopher Wool, Jutta Koether, and Martin Kippenberger (many of whom working, directly or otherwise, under the influence of Sigmar Polke and Jörg Immendorff of the generation prior). When Oehlen speaks of abstraction—the discourse in which he has worked exclusively since the late 1980s—his remarks provide illumination for his coterie at large: “Basically, the word abstract for me should be something like degenerated, perverted, unfinished, turned out badly. In the typical abstract painting the artist tries to paint something figurative and then fails.” (“Conversation between Judicael Lavrador and Albert Oehlen” in Albert Oehlen, Paris and Nîmes, 2011, p. 16). As Oehlen has entirely removed himself from the figurative project, he maintains a critical distance from the typified forms of abstraction that he sees produced by other artists, calling attention instead to his own prolific output, eclectic tastes, and rich and visual vocabulary. This distance allows him the freedom to create unabashed—and coveted—works, maintaining his forefront position in contemporary painting as he continually pulls apart the expectations of the discourse with each new work that he paints. Untitled is truly a celebration of abstraction that makes buoyant the lively decisions, instincts, and acts of the twenty-first century artist.