Footnotes

Provenance
Gagosian Gallery, New York
Private Collection, Turkey
Acquired directly from the above by the present owner

Exhibited
Zürich, Kunsthalle Zürich, Albert Oehlen: An Old Painting In Spirit, 2015
Cleveland, Cleveland Museum of Art, Albert Oehlen: Woods near Oehle, 2016, no. 22, p. 57, illustrated in colour


An artist of uncompromising versatility whose punkish resolve has consistently challenged the prevailing painterly mores of his day, one cannot consider the arc of contemporary painting without placing Albert Oehlen at the apex of its developments since the 1980s. Presented here, from one of his most accomplished and novel series, the Baumbilder (tree paintings), Untitled (Baum 18) is a monumental example of Oehlen's bombastic style at its most distilled, harmonious, and complete.

A painting included in prestigious institutional solo exhibitions at the Kunsthalle Zürich (An Old Painting In Spirit, 2015) and the Cleveland Museum of Art (Woods near Oehle, 2016), such museum-quality, exhibited examples from this series are rare to market. Capturing the mature style of an artist whose legacy is cemented in the academic and commercial annals of the art world, the short yet illustrious history of Untitled (Baum 18) is testament to its importance as one of the most prodigious works by Oehlen in recent decades.

Oehlen's career has been defined by his brazen and anarchic attitude towards painting. Establishing himself in earnest in the early 1980s, Oehlen emerged as a young maverick associated with the European arm of Neo-Expressionism; a group dominated by his compatriots Gerhard Richter, Sigmar Polke, and Georg Baselitz. Despite owing much to this generation of painters who had synthesised a renewed form of gestural, figurative painting, and sought to revive the medium from its critical diminution in Minimalism, Nouveau réalisme and Conceptualism, it was with his close friends Martin Kippenberger and Werner Büttner that Oehlen rejected the old hat 'expressionism' of the prevailing ideology.

Oehlen's resistance was pointed, witty, and unpredictable, resolving to upend the solemn ground of the artist's canvas by employing humour and parody as equally as criticism. A central protagonist of the Junge Wilde – the 'young wild ones': a group of German, predominantly Berlin-based, artists in the 1980s – Oehlen produced work that at once cited and sabotaged artistic traditions; calling painting into question to create new perspectives.

He collided styles, colours, surfaces, and subjects, producing what he termed 'bad paintings' towards the end of the 1980s; disorganised, layered canvases that sought to subvert the academic narrative that upheld the sincerity of figurative, expressive painting. Oehlen engaged the medium itself, using the plastic syntax of the surface to create arrangements that were intensely abstract and kaleidoscopic, yet operatic, sonorous, and grand in their ambition.

This musicality prevails across Oehlen's oeuvre. His intense working relationship with free-form jazz and electronica has informed the artist's technique from the earliest days of his career, working through organisation and improvisation to address the constraints of his chosen medium with absolute freedom. In this vein, 'Oehlen tries to do with painting what others (Coltrane, Zappa) have attempted in jazz or rock: to immerse the listener in a burst of overlapping, saturated and expansive strata, getting rid of any story-line. [...] Oehlen's painting-machine is a mixer that flings objects, images and traces into outer space' (Pierre Sterckx, 'Albert Oehlen: Junk Screens', Albert Oehlen, France 2005, n.p.).

The oscillation between spontaneity and composition, abstraction and figuration, culture and counter-culture, underpins Oehlen's practice. 'I am convinced that I cannot achieve beauty via a direct route,' the artist declares: 'that means working with something where your predecessors would have said, 'You can't do that'. First you take a step toward ugliness and then, somehow or other, you wind up where it's beautiful' (the artist in: Stephan Berg Ed., Albert Oehlen, Bonn 2012, p. 71).

Consistently pushing the boundaries of painterly practice, using the latest technologies, supports and mediums to assemble his pictures, Untitled (Baum 18) – itself one of the most commanding paintings by the artist on aluminium Dibond – translates as a guitar solo in paint; combining passages of sharps and flats, tempo and fermata, Oehlen achieves a contained symphony that is perfectly pitched and magnificent to behold.

Approaching his practice with such a variety of impulses, constraints, and source material, Oehlen's intuitive and restless spirit shares much with the Post-Conceptualism of American painters Christopher Wool, Steven Parrino, Richard Prince, and Barbara Kruger. Whilst the strictly American branch of contemporary painting has its genealogy in Pop Art, unpacking and deconstructing the aspirational, glamourised image of late capitalism to reveal the Nietzschean tragedy at its core, the intensity with which these artists have rebuked the status quo, reclaimed cultural archetypes and inverted their creative medium is absolutely in step with Oehlen and the contrarianism of the Junge Wilde that broke with the stalwart expressionism of the 1970s and 80s. Oehlen, alongside Kippenberger, Büttner, Jörg Immendorff, and A.R. Penck, remains the principal catalyst and origin of a new wave of painting that continues today in the work of Adam Pendleton, Joe Bradley, and Josh Smith.

In Untitled (Baum 18), the virtuoso hand and command of his medium is patently clear; no one element is overweight, misplaced, or imbalanced. It is a work of astonishing clarity. Imposing in scale, yet contemplative and austere, Oehlen's compositional mastery plays out across the present work in discrete passages of variegated paint folded over one another, teetering between figuration, landscape, and abstraction. Capsizing the figure-ground relationship, Oehlen achieves an almost ethereal quality here. Rendering the painting a stark white, with glimmers of an underpainting reaching through, the crisp arpeggio of blue translates as a window onto a paling horizon, over which the systematic arms of the artist's tree is suspended.

For Oehlen, the tree is as much an abstraction of its constituent parts as his given subject matter, once referring to the tree as a 'program' for his paintings, not just a motif: 'In the beginning, when I first had the tree in the painting, I needed some motif. I thought, the tree, ah! [...] Then I started thinking, what makes it a tree? I can go here, I can go there, and whatever I do, it is still a tree as long as there's something in the middle rather thicker to the outside' (the artist in: Nate Freeman, ''I Just Enjoy Making a Big Mess,': Albert Oehlen on His Deconstructed Tree Paintings at Gagosian', ARTnews, 14 April 2017, online).

The tree as both an image and as a formulaic approach to picture-making has been incarnated variously throughout his career; a vector point between series' that the artist has returned to since his 'bad paintings' of the 1980s, using the 'program' to re-engage and tether Oehlen's experimentation with composition, media, and technique. A touchstone for the artist, therefore, the Baumbilder series has unique gravitas as one of the most significant passages in the artist's career to emerge thus far – the creative genome of Oehlen's practice that has been definitive of how he constructs his paintings.

Praised and intensely examined in academic settings, Oehlen's career has inspired critics, curators, and fellow artists alike. This institutional significance is evident in the public museum collections around the world that proudly hold examples of his works including the Centre Pompidou, Paris, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles, the Museum of Modern Art, New York, MUMOK (Museum Moderner Kunst), Vienna, and the Tate Collection, London.

Consolidating his place as a pioneer of contemporary painting working either side of the millennium, Oehlen's status as a blue-chip artist of the highest calibre has made such large scale works ever more sought-after. Presented here for sale, Untitled (Baum 18) is an extraordinary work from one of Oehlen's most recent and celebrated series that has rarely come to market. Monumental and breathtaking, yet beautiful and delicate, the present painting is demonstrative of an artist at the zenith of his powers; confident and precise, Oehlen has deployed a chorus of brushwork that is held in perfect harmony by its counterbalanced composition. Boasting two inclusions in major retrospective exhibitions in Switzerland and the U.S.A., this represents an opportunity to acquire a museum-accredited work of outstanding quality by an artist whose prominence continues to go from strength to strength.