Beschreibung:

PROPERTY FROM AN IMPORTANT EUROPEAN COLLECTION Albert Oehlen Ameisen 1982 acrylic on linen 190.5 x 160.3 cm. (75 x 63 1/8 in.)
Provenance Max-Ulrich Hetzler GmbH, Stuttgart Exhibited Darmstadt, Hessischen Landesmuseum, Schlachtpunk. Malerei der Achtziger Jahre. Literature Sascha Anderson, Tiefe Blicke: Kunst der achtziger Jahre aus der Bundesrepublik Deutschland, der DDR, Österreich und der Schweiz, Cologne, 1985, fig. 44 (illustrated) Catalogue Essay “ [Painting] is sort of finding the beautiful out of things that would ordinarily be a component of what’s regarded as ugly—like making something off-key.” ALBERT OEHLEN An important German painter, who studied under Sigmar Polke and has been a fixture of the contemporary art world since the 1980s, Albert Oehlen has exhibited extensively at select art institutions throughout the United States and Europe (the Museum of Modern Art, Museum of Contemporary Art, Miami, Whitechapel Gallery in London, Musee d’ Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, etc.). Part of the Cologne art scene and a close friend of renowned German artist Martin Kippenberger Oehlen was originally associated with the Neue Wilde, a group of predominantly German painters and enfants terribles, whose irreverent attitudes but serious concerns with the potential of painting are latent in Oehlen’s work. Indeed, Oehlen’s distinctive and heterogeneous artistic output, which includes a wide range of techniques and subjects, such as abstraction, collage, figuration, and even digitally-generated designs, is marked by a disregard, even a disdain, for traditional painting techniques and motifs. Systematically undermining bourgeois notions of beauty, “good form” and virtuosity, Ameisan can be seen as a reaction to the pressures that Oehlen, like many other painters of the 80s, felt as he attempted to reimagine the possibilities of a medium that had already been repeatedly reinvented throughout the 19th and 20th century. The painting’s slightly off-kilter but close framing, combined with a monumentalising scale, forces the viewer to contemplate a subject matter that never materializes into anything more than what the painting’s title flatly announces: ants, just ants. The subject’s repellent nature is only surpassed by its triviality. The effect is at first disconcerting, then humorous—the target of the joke being none other than the stifling conventions of “high art” that Oehlen always deftly undermines through his carefully calculated compositional choices. The work thus positions itself in a long-existing undercurrent of modern art, one constituted of dissident avant-garde artists, such as the Dadaists, who rejected all things fine in the fine arts for the purposes of a powerful critique of accepted notions of art. Read More