ART CITIES:N.York-Albert Oehlen

One of the most respected painters today, Albert Oehlen constantly questions the methods and means of painting to raise a sense of awareness of the medium, which he aims to reinvent and to reshape, always in opposition to traditional hierarchies. Albert Oehlen has been continually colliding various styles, orders or mediums since the ‘80s, expanding the notion of painting to “What he wants to see”.

By Dimitris Lempesis
Photo: Gagosian Gallery Archive

In the solo exhibition “Elevator Paintings: Trees”, Albert Oehlen presents two series of works for the first time in New York. The works on “Tree Paintings” are permutations of an ongoing series that Oehlen began more than 30 years ago. For this iteration, he limited his palette to predominantly black and red. On bright white Dibond, black lines track the hand’s erratic ambulations, while red gradations are contained within geometric figures of a more digital register. The black, mobile lines take on a representative function, as if measuring their own relation to the red, still planes. Using a new technical approach, the “Elevator Paintings” are all-over polychromatic oil paintings in which Oehlen stages oppositions between clear contours and amorphous blurs. Over areas of clean, solid color, he applies voracious sprays, drips, and strokes in muddy greens and grays, deep reds and flesh tones, further complicating his conflation of erasure and enhancement. In the ‘70s, Oehlen studied in Hamburg with Sigmar Polke and joined the circle of artists associated with the painter Jörg Immendorff. He came to prominence in Germany in the early ‘80s alongside his friends and frequent collaborators Werner Büttner, Georg Herold, and Martin Kippenberger, participating in a general return to painting taking place internationally at the time. At the very beginning of his career, Oehlen set himself the task of exploring the language, structures, and experiences of painting. His work has since oscillated between figuration and abstraction, a dynamic that Oehlen constantly renews through the creation of rules and limitations that yield unpredictable results. Through this process, he has managed to reinvigorate seemingly exhausted genres of painting like portraiture, collage, and gestural abstraction. His work encapsulates both a skepticism of and faith in painting in the face of shifting critical positions and technological innovations. The range of imagery and techniques that Oehlen has deployed throughout his career is staggering. His canvases capture haunting interiors, mutating self-portraits, archaic and digital landscapes, cryptic fragments of language, and abstractions enlivened by myriad chromatic and stylistic variations. Across all of his work, Oehlen displays an experimental and intuitive approach to painting infused with a refreshingly irrational sensibility and inspired by a variety of influences, including punk and Surrealism. Each new series by Oehlen presents a radical new proposition for the possibilities of painting and for the kinds of information, images, and experiences it can contain. In recent years, as a younger generation of artists has turned again to painting as a critical medium, Oehlen’s work has only become more influential and prescient.

Info: Gagosian Gallery, 522 West 21st Street, New York, Duration: 28/2-15/4/17, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 10:00-18:00, www.gagosian.com