Albert Oehlen at Skarstedt
Art in America, June-July, 2005 by Edward Leffingwell
The five expressively figurative paintings selected for this time-capsule exhibition date from 1980 and 1981, the time of Albert Oehlen's first solo exhibition in Stuttgart. "Bad," brash, irreverent and, in retrospect, painterly, such works must have seemed shocking at the time, their subjects absurd, even unsuitable, for Oehlen's then mock-heroic, bravura handling of paint. Controversial by intent, the paintings seem poised on the borderline of mastery and its rejection. Because of his facility, Oehlen would be incorrectly linked to the return to figuration championed by the Neue Wilden of Berlin, rather than with the Hamburg camp of his colleagues, among them Martin Kippenberger, with whom he often exhibited.
It may be that Oehlen's purpose at the time included the address of painting as a declining art, a "dinosaur." To further that interpretation, tempera, among the oldest and most durable of studio options, is his medium for one of these paintings. Quick to dry, the medium forced Oehlen to work rapidly. The 3-by-4-foot canvas Schauen nu schauen (Looking, Just Looking, 1980) seems hastily brushed. A dinosaur is placed just off center as though buffeted by ocean waves, out of its element, knee-deep in surf that is a hasty accumulation of broad, diagonal strokes. For an untitled, vertically oriented canvas of the same year and roughly the same size, Oehlen turned to water-based emulsion as medium, gaining a smooth, nonreflective surface and ease of handling. A comical water rat on skis zooms along a body of water at the foot of a funky range of chunky mountains, mocking the traditions of landscape painting dear to Western culture, and resolutely gray. Another untitled painting with similar palette, the largest canvas at nearly 6 feet square, offers two alert prairie dogs standing watch in a roughly painted field of latex, near abstract beneath a leaden sky.
The two remaining paintings are darker in implication: the theme is war and the price of war. In the 26-by-35-inch Muetzen (Hats, 1981), Oehlen turns again to latex for its general translucence. The composition consists of a row of four military hats at the edge of a table. The globe behind them is turned on its axis to Africa and Asia, with what appear to be bolts of lightning on either side. The ironically titled Die Zeit heilt alle Wunden (Time heals all wounds, 1981) consists of four 20-by-23-inch canvases in oil, painted wet-on-wet and installed horizontally in a row. A skull is central to each, and the ambiguous fields in which they rest could be of earth or water, writhing with worms or eels. Taken together, these compelling paintings imply the tenor of the time, the road taken and the roads to come with the rise of the Greens and the collapse of the Wall stretching into the future.
COPYRIGHT 2005 Brant Publications, Inc.
COPYRIGHT 2005 Gale Group
Top of Page