The German painter Albert Oehlen (born in Krefeld in 1954) is of the same generation as the infamous Martin Kippenberger (1953–97), recently celebrated so lavishly at Tate Modern. They were good friends and collaborated on various projects, including jokey mottoes on ‘I Love…’ stickers and poems. Both were of that group of German artists who turned to joking as a way of dealing with the artist’s predicament in an age of so-called postmodernism. If Kippenberger was the wilder of the two, obsessed with being famous and grabbing headlines for a whole stream of pranks and artistic interventions, Oehlen has gone on to produce an increasingly authoritative body of work after his self-destructive friend’s tragic early death. It’s not exactly a case of the tortoise and the hare, but certainly Oehlen now looks at least as interesting an artist as his more famous compatriot.
At the Whitechapel is the first proper survey of Oehlen’s work in Britain, partnered by a parallel (but strangely not contemporaneous) show at the Arnolfini in Bristol. To get the full Oehlen experience, you doubtless have to visit both exhibitions, which contain very different sorts of work, but for some reason the Arnolfini display doesn’t open until 30 September (and then continues until 26 November). In keeping with the ludic, disruptive and openly contradictory nature of the work, the Bristol show is subtitled ‘I Will Always Champion Bad Painting’. Is this indicative of a desire to have it both ways, or simply an inability to distinguish between the two? That question remains (largely unanswered) at the heart of this work. As Oehlen himself has said, ‘I want an art where you see how it’s made, not what the artist means but the traces of production.’
The ground floor of the Whitechapel is bedecked with a dozen or so of Oehlen’s paintings, choice traces of production, and the airy hang without too many partitions makes them look very impressive. The paintings are hung low on the walls, and the initial impression is of a mixture of the dingy and the vivid, with quite an emphasis on pattern and texture. The paint is splashed and walloped around on these canvases in a refreshingly no-nonsense manner. If first appearances suggest an abstract artist at work, look more closely. In ‘Evilution #1’ (note the spelling), there are various figurative elements lying on their sides, suggesting that this long horizontal painting was once worked on upright. (This is actually a strategy of Oehlen’s: turning the canvas as he works.) A couple of skulls and a figure, possibly female, wearing high heels, emerge from the acid colours and the deliberate obfuscation of the overpainting. In ‘Scaffolding’, there’s another head, like a painted primitive carving, juxtaposed with various painterly swipes and splodges and suggestions of machinery.
Oehlen goes in for jarring colour combinations, and early on developed various methods of applying colour in order to take the pressure off deciding which to use. As he volunteers: ‘I had no idea about colours. I couldn’t handle them, I wasn’t even interested.’ This can result in rather beguiling effects, such as the vertical rainbow band, like a squeeze of multicoloured toothpaste, positioned over a loosely organic root-system structure in ‘Untitled’ (1994). Oehlen likes layers which tend to contradict themselves, both in terms of colour and form. The chaotic richness which develops breaks all the rules. Here are paintings all higgledy-piggledy like transparent bird’s nests: stain and splodge and wild linearity — the equivalent of scribble with paint — and everywhere the effects of energy and speed. It’s quite evident that this artist enjoys the medium of oil paint while maintaining a quaint disrespect for it.
Look at the Dalì-esque dayglo romp entitled ‘(Writing [on the street])’ which features a running skeleton, elaborately moustached heads or planets in green and yellow spinning around, with a sort of soft toy atop a classical column, like a cuddly doggie on a monument. The garish colours enhance the spoof effect: a strip of colour-coding and a lot of smudging and gestural extravagance. Yet further down the gallery, past the fabric pattern abstracts, is a painting which is rather beautiful. It contains distinctive elements of pink overpainting like a street-map or electrical circuit, superimposed on a wall of fragments, like layers of half-removed posters. (Incidentally, Oehlen makes separate poster works which will be shown at the Arnolfini, along with his computer paintings.)
Spatially confused, even lazy, they might be, but ultimately these paintings are good-humoured. The work upstairs is not quite so optimistic. A group of collages, mostly rather inert (except for one, from 2003, on a green background), offer a clumsy prologue to the collage paintings, and the far more mysterious grey paintings. These last are full of subtle and intriguing drawing, like the forces of confluence and conflict in ‘Drawn Dogs’. The exhibition ends with a powerful canvas called ‘Chimney Fire’. It depicts a vast, splashily painted and rather ordinary domestic interior, except that there’s a forest fire exploding in the fireplace. Could this possibly be meaningful? Oehlen has described his painting as ‘post-non-representational’, but that’s as likely as anything else he’s said about his work to be a joke. (Perhaps he should paint all his red herrings grey.)
Martin Clark, in a lively essay in the catalogue, refers to Oehlen’s painting as a sort of ‘Frankenstein’s monster; cobbled together from the best and the worst bits of art history’s gaudy corpses’. Yet it is more than just a montage of quotes. The controlling intelligence animates and reinterprets the borrowings, even if it doesn’t quite intend to. A new synthesis is made, a new identity. The mock-ignorant stance doesn’t really convince. Nor the desperate urge to dismiss it all as a joke. You get the impression that Oehlen is forever trying to be a bad boy, but can’t help making good paintings. And however much he dislikes that fact, he should acknowledge it. He is left, clinging to the wreckage of his forms, not drowning but waving.
This is the Whitechapel at its best: showing influential and significant contemporary painting to great advantage in a welcoming and well-ordered space. (Apparently, among those British artists who have been influenced by Oehlen are Peter Doig, Glenn Brown and Chris Ofili.) It’s also a free exhibition. It deserves to attract good audiences and stimulate debate. This is not just an exhibition for art students looking for ideas, but for anyone interested in the present state of painting and its future prospects.
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