ALBERT OEHLEN

Known for his exploration of the means and methods of art, Albert Oehlen often applies self-imposed formal constraints to critically examine the history and conventions of contemporary art, whilst giving himself something to paint against. He combines expressive gesture with a surrealist attitude, overriding the search for constant forms and meanings.

In his paintings, Oehlen takes up details and isolated themes from existing groups of works, including the tree motif which has fascinated the artist as a form and system since the early 1980s, the ‘John Graham Remixes’ (1997–ongoing), the ‘u.b.B.’ paintings (2020–2022), and the ‘Ömega Man’ series (2021–ongoing). This marks an inward-facing shift in Oehlen’s practice as his paintings become self-referential. Here, the act of transferring the images into a new state is of greater importance than the source material. There is no separation between abstraction and figuration, improvisation and control; there are only the endless possibilities of the medium.

The majority of the paintings are rendered with a grid-like structure, giving the works the appearance of mosaic pictures. The fragmentation within the images varies: some of the grid-patterns are more regular, while others vary in size and shape. This interruption of the surface provides a reference to the title of the exhibition, which translates to ‘Pig Cubism’. By breaking up the pictorial motif, the Cubists created a way of coding human space in the context of its radical flattening. A group of four large Untitled paintings can be seen as a particularly pronounced form of this structured fragmentation. Reworking the same source in different distortions, the paintings encompass the self-imposed constraints within which the artist operates.

Four shaped canvases alongside a further painting continue the artist’s ‘Ömega Man’ series, initiated in 2021. The paintings deploy the Ω (omega) symbol as a recurring motif which Oehlen submits to ongoing graphic distortions. The last letter of the Greek alphabet, omega is written here with an umlaut: phonetically emulating the artist’s name, the paintings thus refer to the artist himself, whilst also referencing the fictional survivor of a global pandemic from Boris Sagal’s 1971 dystopian film, The Omega Man. The repetition of the genderless humanoid form also evokes a Cubist way of image-making, recalling the cut-outs and collages from Picasso’s compositions of the 1910–1920s. The ‘Ömega Man’ can thus be seen as a double agent in his function as an abstracting figure or as a figure used in the service of abstraction, whilst also providing a pictorial anchor, at once making and unmaking the painting.

The aluminium sculptures on view are imbued with the appearance of hybrid creatures, incorporating similar shapes to those seen in the paintings. The vocabulary of Oehlen’s celebrated ‘Baumbilder’ (Tree Paintings) and ‘Ömega Man’ works here translates into the three-dimensional with seeming ease and readability. The artist also intervenes into the preexisting gallery space, where a curved wall has been constructed. Behind it, a yellow wall references the initial presentation of Oehlen’s early ‘Ömega Man’ paintings at Reena gallery in Los Angeles in 2022. Looking for trouble through productive systems of resistance, Oehlen continues to create chaos in paint, expanding the future of the medium.