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About Albert Oehlen and his art

Text written by Patricia Ellis

Proclaiming there's no viable role for painting today, Albert Oehlen's work focuses exclusively on exposing art's failures. Borrowing from the tropes of traditional abstract painting, Oehlen readily subverts art's lofty idealism. Using traditional forms and techniques, he conceives a contemporary dialogue of criticism based on the possibilities of creative function rather than aesthetics. In a modern world where painting is considered dead, Albert Oehlen reinvents its life as a manic zombie state: mutated, funny and ideologically dangerous.

'Because we now refuse to deny the direct dependence and responsibility of art vis-à-vis reality, and on the other hand see no chance for art as we know it to have an effect, there is only one possibility left: failure.' Albert Oehlen

Albert Oehlen studied with Sigmar Polke in Hamburg in the 1970's and emerged in the early 80's, along with contemporaries Martin Kippenberger, Georg Herold and Werner Büttner as part of a generation acting in critical and often comedic contradiction to the predominant ideology of the time.

At the heart of Albert Oehlen's practice is a serious engagement with the history of painting and a radical political opposition to its hierarchies and values. Redefining the consequence of painting in a post-painterly era, he describes his work as 'post-non-representational'. Through exploring and challenging the tropes and expectations of traditional abstraction, he strives to reconstitute a contemporary meaning for art as an independent articulate form.

Albert Oehlen's work is wide-ranging in media and style, amalgamating figurative, abstract and layered elements to broaden the scope of painting. His most recent works are often produced through computer-generated design, incorporating collaged photographic and printed elements as a means to explore new territories of representation and reception. By adopting the 'unprofessional' qualities of collage, he shuns traditional criticism and defines his work by the limitations of its own construction.

Albert Oehlen's paintings are neither beautiful nor seductive. Instead, they are elaborate strategies of provocation. Their self-consciously brutal surfaces seem to be corrupted from within, a perversion of the paintings they might have been.

Working from an ironic position of failure, he uses abstraction as a metaphor for breakdown: of perceived reality, artistic function and aesthetic effect. Albert Oehlen's paintings offer a raw confrontation with the deficiencies of visual language and illustrate its trappings in their making.

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