Untitled

A leading figure in contemporary German painting since the 1980s, Oehlen, who trained under Sigmar Polke, emerged alongside artists such as Martin Kippenberger, Werner Büttner, and Georg Herold during a moment when painting’s very relevance was being questioned. Rather than abandon the medium, Oehlen has continually reimagined it—mixing abstraction and figuration, gesture and collage, and even computer-generated imagery—to test what painting can still be. His works often probe painting’s limits, pushing gesture, structure, and composition until their excess turns ironic, playful, and unexpectedly fresh.

In Untitled, broad, sweeping strokes of brown, peach, and yellow paint unfold across the canvas, interrupted in the lower half by a roughly sketched black, linear shape. Smudges of violet, orange, and teal drift through the composition, while thin drips and overlapping layers of color reveal that the artist rotated the canvas as he worked. The result is simultaneously spontaneous and deliberate, as well as responsive to the possibilities of paint itself.

A former musician, Oehlen likens his approach to the improvisation of jazz or the raw energy of punk: serious and absurd in equal measure. In his words, "It’s comparable to a classic jazz soloist—he runs riot within his harmony and stretches it as far as it can go."[1]

[1] The artist quoted in "Fredi Fischli and Niels Olsen in conversation with Albert Oehlen," Albert Oehlen: Home and Garden. Exh. cat. New Museum, New York, 2015, p. 102.