Albert Oehlen: ‘New Paintings’
Albert Oehlen lets it all hang out. The heftily post-modern contemporary German artist’s approach to painting has always been to strip it back, expose it, lay it bare. What's left, whether good or bad (and ‘bad’ is something he’s always been a big exponent of), is painting at its basest, most obvious. These new works are heavily gridded, the picture planes clearly, visibly divided. There are repeated elements, fragments that fracture and stutter across the works, like they’re constantly being reworked, reconsidered. Each grid is its own mini-abstract painting, a little burst of clashing colour and technique. Pull back and look at them from afar and they coalesce into a cohesive whole - a well-composed abstract, a nude in repose - or they don’t, they fail, they’re ugly, bad. But whatever the result, it feels intentional, like it’s all part of Oehlen exploring what painting is. He’s making the hidden processes of painting visible, exposing painting’s guts. He’s saying this is how the sausage gets made: it’s not magic, it’s not sublime, it’s just grids and lines and colour, it’s basic. Art is simple. Obviously, this is painting for its own sake, it’s not about big themes like capitalism or colonialism or whatever, it’s not trying to say anything. It’s just painting, and even when it’s bad it’s still pretty good.