Jeans

"Starting from the recognition of his desire to paint and the energy it released, Oehlen has gradually opened up painting till by the early 1990s he had attained an abstraction entirely renewedSoon enough-because technical mastery must always be resisted-two instruments arrived to help 'spoil the fun': the claptrap din of words and images from advertising and a sort of DIY bodging with underdeveloped computer tools. The former were first used in aggressively ugly collages and posters-and there formed merely the latest manifestation of something that had been present in Oehlen's work from the beginning: the jubilant black humor of one who, having stood all values on their head, had earned the right to make play with them one and all. The artist had won his freedom and the exploded narrative of modernism merely confirmed him. Now he could ask the sweetest chicks at the ball for a dance: Cubism, Surrealism, German and Abstract Expressionism, Pop Art and even Conceptual Art. He could go to town with his soul mates; Immendorff, Bütner, Kippenberger, Wool or West" (A. Pontégnie, Albert Oehlen, exh. cat. Galerie Max Hetzler, Berlin, 2011, p. 7).