ALBERT OEHLEN | Untitled

Galerie Max Hetzler, Berlin
Acquired from the above by the present owner

Berlin, Galerie Max Hetzler, Open Source: Art at the Eclipse of Capitalism, March - April 2015

Hans Werner Holzwarth, Ed., Albert Oehlen, Cologne 2009, p. 571, illustrated
Hans Werner Holzwarth, Ed., Albert Oehlen, Cologne 2018, p. 363, illustrated

Colour: The colours in the catalogue illustration are fairly accurate. Condition: This work is in very good condition. The sheet is attached verso to the backing board in numerous places. There are artists pinholes to all four corners. The sheet is irregularly cut and undulates slightly. There is some evidence of handling with some associated creases to the extreme edges. Close inspection reveals some skinning in places to the extreme edges and a tiny short tear to the top right hand corner. All surface irregularities are in keeping with the artist's working process.
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Cerebral yet irreverent, legible yet opaque, Untitled, from 2008 is an exuberant instance of Albert Oehlen’s Computer Paintings. Comprising chimeric hybrids of all-over painting and new media art, the series demonstrates Oehlen’s masterful manipulation of the newfound signifiers of computational technologies with the techniques of gestural expressionist painting. In the process, the irreducibly mediated nature of late 20th century experience is thrown into relief. Characteristically for Oehlen, the present work is formally very playful. Deliberately stepped, low-resolution pixelated lines of an inkjet printer become gestural arabesques of hand wrought charcoal and spray paint. The computational forms of grids and matrices are interspersed with vegetal tendrils, and primitive gestalts configure faces, eyes, and strange organisms for an instant before dissolution. Sections of concentrated complexity recurse into the picture, forming images of technical glitches, while a pervasive trail of fine dots betrays an organic energy that teems through a perforated computer architecture. In the visual equivalent of artificial strings or hand-claps, the work conceals strangely familiar – but ultimately synthetic – compounds; suggesting simulation’s newfound inextricability from reality. In an elegiac representation of the Internet age, the hand of the artist seems to have been assimilated into this space of pure technological mediation.

Oehlen began his Computing Paintings in the early 1990s following the purchase of his first laptop computer. Using a computer program, he generated a set of visual motifs over four years, and then used permutations of these motifs in the paintings to follow. Invariably, however, Oehlen would augment or combine these motifs with his own handmade forms. This process of experimental collage with pre-existing motifs resembles the idiom of abstract painting that he developed in the late 1980s. In a jazz-like performance, Oehlen deconstructed, obfuscated, and reassembled important visual registers and aesthetics from the history of painting. The results were saturated works that reinvigorated a medium declared dead by the sobriety of minimalism and conceptual art. Just as in his abstract works, Oehlen deliberately fosters a certain tension in Untitled. The viewer is made not to see this cauldron of aesthetics as an aesthetic in itself, and is captivated instead by its sheer musicality and restlessness.