ALBERT OEHLEN | Aromasucher

Sammlung Büttner, Hamburg
Acquired from the above by the present owner

Vienna, Museum Moderner Kunst, Stiftung Ludwig, Albert Oehlen. Painting, June - October 2013, p. 11, illustrated in colour

Colour: The colour in the catalogue illustration is fairly accurate, although the overall tonality is cooler with less magenta undertones in the original. Condition: This work is in very good condition. Extremely close inspection reveals some very fine and unobtrusive drying cracks in intermittent places along the outer edges and some light wear to the lower left corner tip. There is some light canvas draw to the upper corner tips and a faint stretcher bar mark to the centre of the composition. Further close inspection reveals some networks of hairline cracks in isolated places, and a further network of impact cracks, with a tiny speck of loss towards the lower right hand corner, which has been consolidated and fluoresces under ultra-violet light.
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Having studied under Sigmar Polke at the Hamburg Academy of Fine Arts in the late 1970s, Albert Oehlen emerged alongside Martin Kippenberger, Georg Herold and Werner Büttner as an artist central to the German, avant-gardist refashioning of painting in the postmodern period. As Aromasucher demonstrates, Oehlen’s early works stood at the junction point of modernist hegemony and punkish resilience; whose energetic, deliberate paint-handling and collaging of themes and images, would quickly place the artist at the cutting edge of contemporary painting. In Aromasucher, Oehlen skillfully exploits the spectral viscosities of oil paint. Demarcating a rough perspectival space through his drawing, the artist creates a deceptively shallow mise-en-scène that brings the dynamic composition into focus. The present work establishes not only Oehlen’s virtuosity in oil paint – an automatic adroitness that feeds directly into the artist’s more contemporaneous, seminal abstractions over appropriated advertisement posters (see, for example, English Courses (2008)) – but it also attests to the artist’s serial engagement with art historical tropes, aligning himself with the canonical arc of modernism and its technological outmoding. The motif of the Roman statuary and the quasi-architectural space in Aromasucher would appear to echo Giorgio de Chirico’s The Uncertainty of the Poet, 1913, bringing into play an unfashionable classicism that Oehlen “remixes” with a superbly brazen and idiosyncratic style. What emerges is not an archaic semblance, but a pluriform dynamism that unites historicity with the expressive attitude of German Neo-Expressionism.

Dismantling and collaging the trademarks of Marcel Duchamp, the chessboard of the present work nods to the grand master of Modernism and his famous withdrawal from contemporary art practice to pursue chess. Representing a principal painting from the artist’s early career, Aromasucher begin to fundamentally shift the conceptual concerns of painting away from the language of Pop Art in the work of Oehlen’s tutor Sigmar Polke, towards an anachronistic, painterly montage of eclectic material and techniques. As Art historian Fabrice Hergott has observed: “Oehlen is not the master of a single style, unless, perhaps, it is that of shuffling the deck” (Fabrice Hergott cited in: Rod Mengham, ‘Storm Damage’, in: Exh. Cat., London, Whitechapel (and travelling), Albert Oehlen: I Will Always Champion Good Painting; I Will Always Champion Bad Painting, 2006, p. 60). The collaging of surfaces and forms in Aromasucher – a spider’s web of tethers and keyholes – prefigures the artists formal concerns related to composition and structure, and illustrates Oehlen’s masterful dexterity with oil paint that has grown to be his signature.