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Lot Essay
Created in 1989, the present work is an impressive large-scale example of Albert Oehlen’s Spiegelbilder, or ‘mirror paintings.’ This important series, made between 1982 and 1990, consists of interior scenes and portraits with applied sections of mirror. They reflect their surroundings and bring the viewer’s own image into the picture. The present painting, executed in energetic strokes, drips and washes of earthy colour, depicts the corner of a room. A dark ceiling-lamp and pleated curtain are partly painted onto a mirror fixed to the canvas’s upper edge. A second mirror is overpainted with a corner of green carpet. The Spiegelbilder were made as Oehlen transitioned from the faux-Expressionist ‘bad painting’ of his earliest figurative work towards his 1990s voyage into abstraction. This period saw the artist’s star rise not only in Germany but also on the world stage. In 1989, he showed the present work with other large Spiegelbilder at the Renaissance Society in Chicago, as part of a triple-header exhibition with Georg Herold and Christopher Wool. It was also shown in 2007 at the Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlin, as part of a memorial exhibition for the Los Angeles artist Jason Rhoades.
Mirrors have a long history in painting. Seen in the backgrounds of Jan van Eyck’s Arnolfini Portrait (1434) and Diego Velázquez’s Las Meninas (1656), they introduce a complex self-reflexive quality. These depicted mirrors foreground the paintings’ own status as illusory images of reality, creating spatial and philosophical ambiguities that have fascinated scholars for centuries. More recently, artists have used actual mirrors to explore similar ideas. The life-sized human figures applied to Michelangelo Pistoletto’s mirror-paintings, begun in the 1960s, stand at a threshold between actual and reflected space, and invite viewers to experience their own reflections as part of the artwork. Gerhard Richter has also made major works using reflective glass, beginning with his Vier Glasscheiben (Four Panes of Glass) of 1967. Their gleaming surfaces highlight both the promise and emptiness of painting’s traditional role as a window on the world. By incorporating real mirrors into roughly painted interior scenes, Oehlen’s Spiegelbilder muddied such precedents with typical postmodern provocation. ‘This mirror idea allowed me to make an “original” invention,’ he said, ‘but one that is bearable because it is so hackneyed’ (A. Oehlen in conversation with W. Dickhoff and M. Prinzhorn, Kunst Heute, no. 7, 1991, p. 37).
Throughout his career, Oehlen has been driven by a desire to demystify painting. He critiques the medium from within, laying bare its workings, subverting its prestige and testing its limits. In the 1989 show where the present work was debuted, the Spiegelbilder shared with the works of Herold and Wool a mordant sense of humour, as well as a fundamental doubt about painting’s capacity for communication. For the critic Alan G. Artner, this uncertainty made the mood of all three artists’ work hard to discern. ‘We not only have to discover what they say’, he wrote, ‘but also to what degree they mean it’ (A. G. Artner, ‘Renaissance show a challenging trilogy’, Chicago Tribune, 7 April 1989, p. CN48). For all their satirical edge, however, Oehlen’s Spiegelbilder had a serious aim. By summoning the viewer into these interior spaces—which included museums, apartments, studios and prison cells—Oehlen prompted his audience to consider their own entanglement in history, received ways of seeing, and the shifting relationships between past and present.
Fracturing the image of the rooms in which they are placed, the Spiegelbilder are objects that affect and are affected by their social and physical environment. Where it overlays the mirrors, the present work’s painted room transgresses a boundary between illusion and reality. Its plunging perspectival lines and diaphanous pleats heighten the picture’s sense of encroachment upon the viewer. ‘The old trick with the auxiliary lines and perspectival structures was something Oehlen liked to interpret as a spider’s web,’ says Roberto Ohrt, ‘catching thoughts on space in the warp and weft of the imagination’ (R. Ohrt, ‘A tale of the inappropriate’, in B. Riemschneider, ed., Albert Oehlen, Cologne 1995, p. 18). A depicted room is situated within a real one; reflections are glimpsed and others occluded by brushstrokes. Painting might never have been a straightforward way to apprehend the world, Oehlen seems to say, but it might—if we are honest about its making—offer a place to start.
Mirrors have a long history in painting. Seen in the backgrounds of Jan van Eyck’s Arnolfini Portrait (1434) and Diego Velázquez’s Las Meninas (1656), they introduce a complex self-reflexive quality. These depicted mirrors foreground the paintings’ own status as illusory images of reality, creating spatial and philosophical ambiguities that have fascinated scholars for centuries. More recently, artists have used actual mirrors to explore similar ideas. The life-sized human figures applied to Michelangelo Pistoletto’s mirror-paintings, begun in the 1960s, stand at a threshold between actual and reflected space, and invite viewers to experience their own reflections as part of the artwork. Gerhard Richter has also made major works using reflective glass, beginning with his Vier Glasscheiben (Four Panes of Glass) of 1967. Their gleaming surfaces highlight both the promise and emptiness of painting’s traditional role as a window on the world. By incorporating real mirrors into roughly painted interior scenes, Oehlen’s Spiegelbilder muddied such precedents with typical postmodern provocation. ‘This mirror idea allowed me to make an “original” invention,’ he said, ‘but one that is bearable because it is so hackneyed’ (A. Oehlen in conversation with W. Dickhoff and M. Prinzhorn, Kunst Heute, no. 7, 1991, p. 37).
Throughout his career, Oehlen has been driven by a desire to demystify painting. He critiques the medium from within, laying bare its workings, subverting its prestige and testing its limits. In the 1989 show where the present work was debuted, the Spiegelbilder shared with the works of Herold and Wool a mordant sense of humour, as well as a fundamental doubt about painting’s capacity for communication. For the critic Alan G. Artner, this uncertainty made the mood of all three artists’ work hard to discern. ‘We not only have to discover what they say’, he wrote, ‘but also to what degree they mean it’ (A. G. Artner, ‘Renaissance show a challenging trilogy’, Chicago Tribune, 7 April 1989, p. CN48). For all their satirical edge, however, Oehlen’s Spiegelbilder had a serious aim. By summoning the viewer into these interior spaces—which included museums, apartments, studios and prison cells—Oehlen prompted his audience to consider their own entanglement in history, received ways of seeing, and the shifting relationships between past and present.
Fracturing the image of the rooms in which they are placed, the Spiegelbilder are objects that affect and are affected by their social and physical environment. Where it overlays the mirrors, the present work’s painted room transgresses a boundary between illusion and reality. Its plunging perspectival lines and diaphanous pleats heighten the picture’s sense of encroachment upon the viewer. ‘The old trick with the auxiliary lines and perspectival structures was something Oehlen liked to interpret as a spider’s web,’ says Roberto Ohrt, ‘catching thoughts on space in the warp and weft of the imagination’ (R. Ohrt, ‘A tale of the inappropriate’, in B. Riemschneider, ed., Albert Oehlen, Cologne 1995, p. 18). A depicted room is situated within a real one; reflections are glimpsed and others occluded by brushstrokes. Painting might never have been a straightforward way to apprehend the world, Oehlen seems to say, but it might—if we are honest about its making—offer a place to start.