Overview

'Qualities that I want to see brought together: delicacy and coarseness, color and vagueness, and, underlying them all, a base note of hysteria.' —Albert Oehlen

In Untitled, Albert Oehlen presents the corporeal hybrid of a man and a beast. Set against an abstract white ground, the animal is depicted dressed in a shirt and suit, with its eyes and mouth open in stupefaction. Though pictures of stags were long an established part of German culture, with representations of roaring creatures frequently dominating living-room décors, the animal in Untitled seems to dig deeper into Oehlen’s understanding of the creative self, forming part of a wider body of work interrogating – and mocking – the genre of self-portraiture. Seen from this sardonic angle, Untitled is redolent of the French poet Charles Baudelaire’s 1859 poem The Albatross, comparing artists and creative figures to gauche, enervated birds railing against external restrictions. Contained within a large, rectangular canvas, the hybrid being in Oehlen’s Untitled similarly posits as an allegory for a creature under pressure, notably echoing the artist’s similar portrait of a deer in Auch Einer, residing at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago. Recognised as one of the most innovative and significant painters working today, Oehlen was recently celebrated on the occasion of his major solo exhibition at the Serpentine Galleries, London, in 2019.

 

Between Tradition and Modernity

 

Discussing the origins of his painterly practice, Oehlen declared that ‘what sparked my interest was a desire to be involved with the medium that quintessentially represented High Art but which at the time, in the late 1970s, was coming under fierce attack. Added to which, there was a general feeling of massive potential in painting, since so little was happening in that field’.¹ In these interstices between tradition and modernity, impasse and potential, Oehlen ushered a new approach to the medium, populating his canvases with traditional painterly elements, only to ridicule them thereafter. With Untitled, Oehlen’s satirical take on the genre of portraiture forms part of a wider questioning he undertook in the 1980s, whereby he would create self-portraits that deliberately identified with art historical tropes. Subjecting these to cynical subversion, he would, in his biting portraits of stags specifically, fuse the appearance of bestial creatures with his own likeness. With its expressive traits and its indexically ambiguous elements, Untitled is an exquisite example from this sequence of works — and one of his most figurative.

'I want to make beautiful paintings. But I don’t make beautiful paintings by putting beautiful paint on a canvas with a beautiful motif. It just doesn’t work. I expect my paintings to be strong and surprising. When I see a painting that knocks me off my feet, I say "How could he do that? How did he dare?" That’s beauty.'
—Albert Oehlen

A Rebellious Crowd

 

Particularly poignant in Oehlen’s depiction of its central animalistic figure is the artist’s commentary on his analogous status as an outsider. The comparison between Untitled’s stag and Oehlen himself extends a longstanding, universal allegory positing the artist figure as a lone being making one with nature, but also incorporates, more specifically, the unique position Oehlen assumed within the art world of his time, alongside his bombastic friends and frequent collaborators Martin Kippenberger, Werner Büttner and Georg Herold. Resolutely anti-establishment, the four artists would create deliberately termed ‘bad art’, whilst frequently wearing suits – an attire seldom associated with creativity – as an ironic gesture demonstrating the frivolousness of what was socially deemed ‘serious’. Artistically, they nonetheless continued cultivating their pictorial practice, all the while developing a conceptual flair that, in Oehlen’s case, was intensely and discreetly woven in the very subjects of his paintings. ‘[Oehlen] adopts the critical attitude of Conceptual Art’, explained Chirstoph Schreier, ‘but articulates it not from the outside, but from the inside – from inside the painting itself’.²  In Untitled, the monumental stag most serves as Oehlen’s conceptual quip: equally forced into a suit (a metaphorical straitjacket of social convention), the animal is left to gauge the clashing interiority of his persona.

 

¹ Albert Oehlen, quoted in Jorg Heiser and Jan Verwoert, ‘Ordinary Madness: An interview with Albert Oehlen’, Frieze, Issue 78, October 2003.
² Christoph Schreier, ‘Storm Damage – Albert Oehlen’s Painting as a Visual Stress Test’, Albert Oehlen, exh. cat., Kunstmuseum Bonn, 2012, p. 71.