Albert Oehlen

Galerie Nathalie Obadia, Paris (acquired from the artist in 2003)

Private Collection

Sale: Sotheby’s, New York, Contemporary Art Evening Auction, 13 November 2012, Lot 69

Acquired directly from the above by the present owner

Paris, Galerie Nathalie Obadia, Gallery Nathalie Obadia celebrates its tenth anniversary, 2003 

Colour: The colour in the catalogue illustration is fairly accurate, although the orange and yellow tonalities are more fluorescent in the original. Condition: This work is in very good condition. No restoration is apparent when examined under ultraviolet light.
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La Playa Nueva is a consummate example of Oehlen’s turn towards abstraction during his ‘post-non-representational’ period. Evolving from one of Germany’s most exciting painters into one of the most celebrated and influential, Oehlen’s self-professed ‘hunger for paintings’ is echoed in the vivid, energetic and impulsive brushstrokes inherent within the present work. Reflecting his original understanding of the medium, La Playa Nueva blends Oehlen’s theoretically complex understanding of painting with a powerfully alluring aesthetic quality.

Although Oehlen has often been associated with the Neue Wilde painters of the 1980s, the artist has explicitly denounced such a connection, and instead preferred the more conceptual approach to painting that also characterised the work of his friend Martin Kippenberger. His expansive investigations into the medium have resulted in a wide range of painterly strategies, varying from the incorporation of digitally-generated imagery to appropriated advertisements and the deliberately ‘bad’ paintings that echo Kippenberger’s interest in notions of failure. The present work is an outstanding example of the artist’s signature fusion of abstraction and figuration, in which anthropomorphic and figurative forms invoke suggestions of representation that are never really fulfilled, but remain suspended in the interstitial space between familiarity and the unknown. Oehlen typically developed these paintings by working on each canvas in sequence and observing their constituent marks for an extensive amount of time before reaching a moment of resolution.

In La Playa Nueva the flammable bursts of orange dominate the calming blue painterly marks, evoking the juxtaposition of ocean/land or even the elements: water, fire, earth and air. Herein, this breathtaking body of abstract work draws the viewer into a sensorial and dreamlike experience. The artist evokes the beauty of natural scenery with fragmented fluid brushstroke curves that harmoniously subvert compositional logic. Representing a frontier between the viewer’s reality and a swarming abstract world, is La Playa Nueva is an excellent example of Oehlen’s amalgamations of sources and painterly styles.