Albert Oehlen (b.1954. Germany)
Albert Oehlen is a German contemporary artist who uses technology as an important part of his studio practice. Oehlen’s paintings are also prints, or we can say, his prints can arguably be termed as paintings. He explores the inherent possibilities of the painting concept and uses a hybrid of primitive, classical and technological tools - fingers, brushes, collage, computer and large billboard printing machine. They are heavily derived from digitally worked and manipulated images, painted, brushed, and spray painted onto collaged imagery, then printed onto a canvas. He plays with the idea of the digital images and render, overlap and transform them into a slow paced painting process that combines with expressive gestures that look like they are drawn quickly. He usually begins with an abstract collaged or printed ground, then overlay and integrate it with figurative or abstract register, working back and forth between the traditional and the new media and subject.
The wild, flying graffiti lines seem to break all of the rules in painting, yet associate closely to our post-modern, information, urban lives and chaotic minds. In many of his works, the composition is without any constraint yet fixed within some kind of Mondrian-like grid or wall paper patterned background or framework: various printed textures are overlapped and correlated with each other, and can be seen as a more controlled and sober version of Jackson Pollock’s drip paintings.
Albert Oehlen is a German contemporary artist who uses technology as an important part of his studio practice. Oehlen’s paintings are also prints, or we can say, his prints can arguably be termed as paintings. He explores the inherent possibilities of the painting concept and uses a hybrid of primitive, classical and technological tools - fingers, brushes, collage, computer and large billboard printing machine. They are heavily derived from digitally worked and manipulated images, painted, brushed, and spray painted onto collaged imagery, then printed onto a canvas. He plays with the idea of the digital images and render, overlap and transform them into a slow paced painting process that combines with expressive gestures that look like they are drawn quickly. He usually begins with an abstract collaged or printed ground, then overlay and integrate it with figurative or abstract register, working back and forth between the traditional and the new media and subject.
The wild, flying graffiti lines seem to break all of the rules in painting, yet associate closely to our post-modern, information, urban lives and chaotic minds. In many of his works, the composition is without any constraint yet fixed within some kind of Mondrian-like grid or wall paper patterned background or framework: various printed textures are overlapped and correlated with each other, and can be seen as a more controlled and sober version of Jackson Pollock’s drip paintings.
Image: The New Yorker
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