Albert Oehlen in Beijing: A Jazz Improvisation of Color

Albert Oehlen" width="594" height="388" data-caption='Artist Albert Oehlen in 2016. <span class="media-credit">Photo by Christoph Schmidt/picture alliance via Getty Images</span>'>

In the 1980s, the artist Albert Oehlen, in the throes of German Neo-Expressionism, set out to make bad paintings. He purposefully used muddied browns, grays and discordant hues. He was considered one of the “bad boys” of German art, along with his longtime friend, Martin Kippenberger. Together, they painted, exhibited, ate, drank and had endless discussions about art. Punk artists of their time, they deliberately went against the art world. “I’ve always been looking for trouble,” Oehlen famously said.

In the decade following, he began using spray paint over collaged images. Ever the experimenter and punk rebel, he dripped and smeared paint over other cutout canvases, glued and then marked. He smudged the edges or left them sharp. In something like Cubist improvisation, he gobbed on the paint, knifed and gouged at the canvas, sometimes allowing for the sharp connecting edges that suggested three-dimensional space. Then he began playing with digital images and employing black and white reticular diagrams screen-printed onto the canvas before reworking them, adding lines and images. “I define a vocabulary of qualities that I want to see brought together: delicacy and coarseness, color and vagueness and underlying them all, a base note of hysteria.”

Moving into the late ‘90s, he painted a gray series. “I wanted to paint even more powerfully colored pictures and prescribed the gray ones for myself as therapy so as to artificially heighten the craving for color.” Realizing his approach was a bit sober and without emotion, his craving for color reasserted itself. Not a believer in representational art, he saw painting itself as an abstraction and gave himself permission to paint anything, including varying iterations of trees that he has painted in series—Baumbilder—for decades.

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Today, Oehlen’s paintings are exhibited all over the world. On now through October 27 is “Malerei” at the Espace Louis Vuitton Beijing, and the pieces that make up the show, like much of the work he produces, are large and dominate the clean white space. They feel like musical, modulated compositions and a relief from his muddy, messy, dull paintings and computerized sterility. Except for one black-and-white, the paintings here are saturated with color. The volume is amped up or toned down with grace notes of turquoise, purple pizzicato drips, bright blue umlauts, a wail of yellow—like a jazz improv. Watching a recent film he made of himself painting, it’s as if the clumps of paint are leading him into the canvas. Sometimes he brushes the colors together over and over for many minutes, leaving the canvas a silky blend of all the previous colors, then slashes the soft colors with a hunk of black. Loud paintings of complexity. A visceral meal.

Gagosian represents Oehlen. Two of its directors, discussing his work in a 2019 video released by the gallery, said that a 1989 Oehlen painting sold for $4 million, “the threshold after which an artist breaks through into the stratosphere in terms of their market. A huge tectonic price shift.” Apparently, only de Kooning, Christopher Wool and Gerhard Richter had passed that threshold at that time.

In a conversation reproduced in Christian Meyer’s Das unbekannte Meisterwerk, Oehlen said, “When you look at famous Picasso paintings, they sometimes have an overexcited mood… what makes them so much fun is that they’re simultaneously outrageous and earnest.” It’s this confluence of earnestness and ridiculousness that allows the artist to run riot. With Oehlen, many of his works feel pretentious, but then, that’s his bad boy image. He once told an interviewer that you start by creating one group of work, and the longer you work on it, the uglier you make it, so the collectors will feel sorry that they didn’t buy earlier. “Every group of work has to be distinctly worse than the last one, so people will buy the last one.”

Bad boy? Bad art? Clever boy? Making art for the market? You decide.