Albert Oehlen

Per Skarstedt Gallery, New York
Acquired by the present owner from the above

New York, Per Skarstedt Gallery, Albert Oehlen Computer Paintings, April - May 2009

The canvas is not lined. The canvas is stretched unevenly. A few very minor areas of surface soiling scattered throughout, likely due to the artist's working method. Unframed.
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Albert Oehlen started producing the black and white Computer Paintings in the early 1990s. After acquiring his first laptop computer, the artist formulated his own digital motifs that he would continue to employ in variation until the completion of the series in 2008. The Untitled (1) painting is a stunning monochromatic painting from this important body of work within Oehlen’s oeuvre.

The Computer Paintings have an “all-over” quality despite the artist’s partial removal of his hand. They are devoid of drips but expand the entire surface of the canvas. Due to technological limitations, the painting is composed of thick, pixilated lines that appear squared off and angular in form in contrast to lyrical lines interwoven through the composition and the light wash cascading over the surface.

Albert Oehlen conceived of the Untitled (1) painting using a mouse, Photoshop, and inkjet plotters rather than the traditional paintbrush, oil, and canvas. Subsequently he painted over the digital images by using acrylics and oil paint. The crudeness of the line quality was a result of the limits of technology available at the time, which the artist embraced as part of his overall composition. The artist’s monochromatic palette allows for the chance of gradients of grey to the surface to add tonalities and veils of pigmentation over the pure white surface of the canvas.   

The “dot matrix” patterning in Oehlen’s Untitled (1) can be compared to the simulation of a smooth, swath gesture set against the ben-day dot background of Lichtenstein’s 1965 White Brushstroke I.  Lichtenstein’s overly articulated and exaggerated brushstroke feel mechanical. The swath line serves as a muse on what a gesture feels like when simulated as a pastiche of the actual physical process. Similarly, the digital points and hard edge planes in Oehlen’s painting interpret line and motion through a computer output.

Comparison can also be made to the black and white abstract works on paper and paintings on aluminum by Christopher Wool. The artist employs the stark contrasted tones in the same manner one would use the color wheel. Each gradient of pigment creates a contrasting hue, pushing thicker lines to the foreground against the crisp, pungent white ground. When lines overlap each other, a push-pull tension occurs. Both Wool and Oehlen have a sense of removal of the artist’s hand, but seize control over the gesture gracefully with ribbons of mark making on the ground of their painting’s support.

In contrast to the "exquisite corpse" drawings and automatic drawings of his predecessors, the Surrealists and Abstract Expressionists, the digital image replaces the unconscious wandering of the artist’s hand. The computer is utilized as a distancing medium, as an “anti-expressive” factor in the artist’s output, while at the same time, Oehlen challenges the manner by which one paints; he gesticulates mark making vis-a-vis his personal computer, rather than placing a canvas on an easel. According to the artist, “The plan was to be avant-garde on the technical side too." (Ralf Beil, Albert Oehlen Paintings, 1980-2004, Salamanca, 2004, p. 33)