Albert Oehlen

A painting as a platform, a painting as a conveyer – Albert Oehlen’s Der Stand der Dinge, captures a past and a present from which he questions both art and history, whilst simultaneously allowing for painting to become a window into which the viewer is forced to look and make sense between the abstract and figurative modes of expression it presents.

For Oehlen, the late 70s and early 80s characterise a period when Germany’s art scene was experiencing a clash between art, ideology and politics. Oil on canvas had been dismissed as an outmoded medium, from which many artists aimed to escape. Oehlen, however, like his close friend Kippenberger, remained loyal to the method. The period allowed for the canvas to become the platform from which they would communicate and reflect their thoughts and aesthetic both in terms of art itself as well as history. 

Der Stand der Dinge, is a painting exaggerating and distorting the traditions and rules of representation in art, echoing the notion that for Oehlen art needed to be a vehicle of communication. He explores the limitations of abstraction and figuration, by allowing them to co-exist, where the ‘abstracted non-image’ and ‘figurative image’ provide a reciprocal relationship, touching both upon a repressed German history and at the time a denounced medium.  It is a painting that through content and context enables the two modes of expression to be fused together, where Oehlen finds himself partly turning away from a visual world by entering the realm of his country’s historic consciousness.

His chosen colour scheme of rusts, browns and blacks mixed with saturated yellows, blues and greens once again seems to juxtapose the combination of not only the abstract and the figurative, but in turn, the actual.  Even though at first glance the recognisable candlesticks, books and military portrait may be devoid of any meaning, the viewer is left to decipher the possible relationship between the abstract earth tones and the coloured objects. Yet again, Oehlen seems to question history in relation to the presence, using atmospheric and symbolic tools to illustrate a connotative message. The candles serve as memento mori, but they also shed light on the past and like the depicted books remind us that history is written down – an idea that becomes loaded with meaning, stripping the painting down to its bare details and understanding its relation to art and history.

In effect, Der Stand der Dinge encourages the viewer to link the figurative to a collective memory and the abstract to a repressed past.  As a result, Oehlen indirectly implores the viewer to question the ‘apparent discord’ of the two modes of expression and to realise the beauty within the disjointed nostalgia they create when placed together in context.