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Overview
Forming part of a sequence of paintings Albert Oehlen created between 2007 and 2009, Control demonstrates the artist’s propensity to blur the boundaries between diverse artistic media, locating his production at the threshold of painting, sculpture, and the readymade. With its neon-like borders, its typeset writing, its photographic component and its strokes of blue and ochre paint, the composition straddles calculation and spontaneity, intellectualism and instinct, devising a number of layers from which to envisage the final image. The artist ‘attacks with paint the shallow clamour of transferred digital pixelation and, in some works, glued-on advertising posters’, writes Peter Schjeldahl. ‘He wrestles their visual quiddities – how they look, irrespective of what they represent – down into the body and makes them groan’.i Building upon this synaesthetic framework, and forming a feverish mêlée of pictorial animation, Control demonstrates Oehlen’s ability in producing precisely what the work’s title enunciates: total and exacting discipline in conjuring a multifarious image. 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.’
'For my recent work, I stuck posters on the canvas and smeared paint over them. I was aiming at abstract painting that had an innate irritability caused by the obtrusive adverts… Every now and then, the interplay between two posters creates a joke, but there’s no statement behind the content, the content implodes.' —Albert Oehlen
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’.ii In these interstices between tradition and modernity, impasse and potential, Oehlen flourished and ushered a new, revisionary approach to the medium, populating his canvases with profusions of traditional painterly elements only to better undermine them thereafter. With Control, Oehlen’s adversary take on the medium forms part of a wider questioning he undertook throughout his career, whereby he would identify key art historical tropes – herein, the dominance of two-dimensionality – and subsequently subvert them. In the 1990s, he began to compound computer-generated images, painted with a mouse and applied to a canvas with an inkjet printer, with more traditional painting materials such as oils and acrylic. Through these mechanically made pictures, Oehlen was able to redefine the notion of artistic authorship. ‘[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’.iii The result, in the present composition, aptly typifies the artist’s self-coined ‘post-non-figurative’ style, blending a variety of visual information on a single, flat ground.
Marcel Duchamp, Mona Lisa (L.H.O.O.Q), 1919, ready made with pencil,
Philadelphia Museum of Art. Image: Scala Images.Boasting a humorous mix of written and visual content, amounting to a derisive disruption of the painterly tradition, Control recalls the conceptual gestures undertaken by Marcel Duchamp decades before, when the artist utilised familiar images that he would alter with his own hand, and caption with enigmatic quips. Exemplifying this irreverent approach, Duchamp’s L.H.O.O.Q, 1919, takes the iconic image of the Mona Lisa and turns it on its head, labelling the result with an acronym that, when read aloud, translates to ‘There is fire down below’. Similarly, Oehlen’s Control devises a legible linguistic component at its core, that reads ‘Aaaarrghh’ – as if textually embodying the hodgepodge of information that is distributed across the canvas. Both playing with visual codes typically prevalent in the advertising realm, L.H.O.O.Q and Control reveal the methodic approach with which collaged compositions can be created, outwitting the parameters that are usually understood to frame the painterly medium.
'My intention is to have abstract paintings with the aspect of cheapness of bad adds, to activate anti-commercial feelings.' —Albert Oehlen
i Peter Schjeldahl, ‘Painting’s Point Man’, The New Yorker, 15 June 2015, online.
ii Albert Oehlen, quoted in Jorg Heiser and Jan Verwoert, ‘Ordinary Madness: An interview with Albert Oehlen’, Frieze, Issue 78, October 2003.
iii Christoph Schreier, ‘Storm Damage – Albert Oehlen’s Painting as a Visual Stress Test’, Albert Oehlen, exh. cat., Kunstmuseum Bonn, 2012, p. 71.Provenance
Thomas Dane Gallery, London
Private Collection, U.K.
Acquired from the above by the present ownerExhibited
London, Thomas Dane Gallery, Albert Oehlen, 29 February - 29 March 2008, no. 3 (illustrated, n.p.)
Literature
Hans Werner Holzwarth, ed., Albert Oehlen, Cologne, 2009, pp. 579, 655 (illustrated, p. 579)
Hans Werner Holzwarth, ed., Albert Oehlen, Cologne, 2017, pp. 377, 493 (illustrated, p. 377)
Ο◆32
Control
signed and dated 'A Oehlen 07' on the reverse
acrylic, printed paper collage and oil on canvas
230 x 200 cm (90 1/2 x 78 3/4 in.)
Executed in 2007.
Estimate
£400,000 - 600,000 ‡♠
Sold for £475,000
Kate Bryan
Specialist, Head of Evening Sale
+44 20 7318 4026
kbryan@phillips.com
20th Century & Contemporary Art Evening Sale
London Auction 20 October 2020
1
Emily Mae Smith
Alien Shores
Estimate £40,000 - 60,000 ‡
Sold for £277,200
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2
Salman Toor
Aashiana (Hearth and Home)
Estimate £30,000 - 50,000 ‡
Sold for £138,600
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3
Portia Zvavahera
Arising from the Unknown
Estimate £40,000 - 60,000 ‡
Sold for £163,800
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4
Titus Kaphar
Alternate Endings
Estimate £60,000 - 80,000 ‡
Sold for £466,200
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5
Hernan Bas
Two Fruits
Estimate £60,000 - 80,000
Sold for £163,800
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6
Otis Kwame Kye Quaicoe
Black Stripes on White
Estimate £20,000 - 30,000 ‡
Sold for £94,500
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7
Dana Schutz
Trump Descending an Escalator
Estimate £380,000 - 580,000 ‡
Sold for £688,000
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8
Banksy
Girl with Balloon & Morons Sepia
Estimate £500,000 - 700,000 ‡♠
Sold for £1,232,500
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9
Nicolas Party
Rocks
Estimate £400,000 - 600,000
Sold for £603,300
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10
Georg Baselitz
Das letzte Selbstbildnis I
Estimate £4,700,000 - 6,000,000 ♠
Sold for £4,983,500
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11
Jean-Michel Basquiat
Back of the Neck
Estimate £450,000 - 650,000 ‡
Sold for £627,500
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12
Keith Haring
Untitled (Grace Jones Mask)
Estimate £1,500,000 - 2,000,000 ‡
Sold for £1,716,500
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13
George Condo
The Age of Reason
Estimate £2,000,000 - 3,000,000 ‡
Sold for £2,082,369
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14
Alex Katz
Ada with Mirror
Estimate £400,000 - 600,000 ‡
Sold for £529,200
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15
Yoshitomo Nara
Magic Carpet
Estimate £500,000 - 700,000
Sold for £504,000
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16
Ed Ruscha
1981 - Future
Estimate £600,000 - 800,000
Sold for £567,000
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17
Jean-Michel Basquiat
Untitled (Pestus)
Estimate £2,000,000 - 3,000,000 ‡
Sold for £2,200,500
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18
Andy Warhol
Flowers
Estimate £1,400,000 - 1,800,000 ‡
Sold for £1,595,500
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19
Sir Peter Blake, R.A.
Nudina
Estimate £60,000 - 80,000 ♠
Sold for £75,600
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20
Allen Jones
Project for Fifteen Foot Women
Estimate £150,000 - 200,000 ♠
Sold for £189,000
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21
Sean Scully
Somebody's Angel
Estimate £600,000 - 800,000 ‡♠
Sold for £1,014,700
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22
Joan Mitchell
Untitled
Estimate £400,000 - 600,000
Sold for £441,000
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23
Cy Twombly
Portrait of Alvise di Robilant
Estimate £500,000 - 700,000 ‡
Sold for £510,300
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24
Alberto Giacometti
Femme debout
Estimate £550,000 - 750,000 ‡
Sold for £651,700
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25
Wojciech Fangor
M 91
Estimate £200,000 - 300,000 ♠
Sold for £252,000
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26
Georges Mathieu
Petite Torture infligée au Marquis de Coconat et à son complice la Môle
Estimate £250,000 - 350,000 ♠
Sold for £252,000
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27
Hurvin Anderson
Marlene’s
Estimate £250,000 - 350,000 ‡♠
Sold for £252,000
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28
This lot is no longer available.
29
Lynette Yiadom-Boakye
Luminary
Estimate £250,000 - 450,000 ♠
Sold for £315,000
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30
Henry Taylor
Ari and the Deer
Estimate £100,000 - 150,000 ‡
Sold for £113,400
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31
Georg Baselitz
Kopf an Kopf II
Estimate £600,000 - 800,000 ‡♠
Sold for £705,000
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32
Albert Oehlen
Control
Estimate £400,000 - 600,000 ‡♠
Sold for £475,000
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33
Rudolf Stingel
Untitled
Estimate £800,000 - 1,200,000 ‡♠
Sold for £990,500
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34
Albert Oehlen
Die Veränderungen
Estimate £700,000 - 900,000 ♠
Sold for £809,000
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35
Günther Förg
Untitled
Estimate £250,000 - 350,000 ♠
Sold for £315,000
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36
Anish Kapoor
Blade
Estimate £60,000 - 80,000 ‡♠
Sold for £85,680
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37
This lot is no longer available.
38
Jason Rhoades
Heroic Vagina
Estimate £150,000 - 200,000
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39
Wolfgang Tillmans
Freischwimmer 27
Estimate £210,000 - 300,000 ♠
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40
Cory Arcangel
Photoshop CS: 110 by 72 inches, 300 DPI, RGB, square pixels, default gradient 'Spectrum', mousedown y=23900 x=11650, mouseup y=32650 x=11650
Estimate £100,000 - 150,000 ‡
Sold for £252,000
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