Major Art Crush.....MAJOR!

Albert Oehlen, Del ahorro at Luhring Augustine

back in 2006 while at an artist residency in maine, fellow resident ferdinand rosa, or as i affectionately called him 'fucking ferdi', introduce me to albert oehlen. i thought, "wow, that's some really cool shit!" the paintings i saw at that time were his LARGE computer generated paintings. i've had a small color print out of one of those paintings on my studio wall ever since.

More Fire and Ice, 2001 - this is the one on my wall

i began to look more closely at his work about 2 months ago and realized to my utter dismay that he had 2, not 1, but 2 solo shows last year in NYC. what the hell?! i totally missed them both. i checked out a monograph from a traveling exhibition in 2004 from the library and have been drooling  ever since. no doubt i've been scouring the internet for his work, interviews, reviews ...anything about him. the image on top is from 2008 and shows how he's pared down his elements and included advertising posters from around spain, where he has a studio. he splits his time between berlin, switzerland, and spain; what a life!

Deathoknocko, 2001

these paintings from the early 2000's are clusterfucks of action! what i like most about his work is his constant layering of forms, areas of pattern and lush application of paint. he just keeps on going and adding and adding. i especially like the swaths of color and how they cover what's come before. it seems like he has an utter disregard for the past. what's most important is the painting and what needs to happen now.

 Untitled (Gelbes Kreuz), 1988

in the 80's he intentionally made what he calls 'bad paintings'. below is a quote from a great interview by glenn o'brien in interview magazine:

Christopher Wool: I like a story you told once that I tell students sometimes. You said you were trying very hard to make seriously bad paintings, while the New Museum version of bad painting was really about something else—it was about outside ideas that were bad—but you were trying to make really bad paintings, and you realized that the worst ones you could make were exactly like the Neue Wilde painters in Berlin. And then you decided it really wasn’t worth it, and Dieter Roth said something similar. He was interested in making bad paintings, and he said he always failed, because with paintings it always looks good in some way. Just because of the material . . . But he could do it with music, he could do it when he was playing the piano by himself, but it was excruciating to listen to, and he would immediately have to stop. It kind of closes the loop.

Albert Oehlen: I mean, you have to do it seriously. You have to take responsibility. You cannot just do it as a side project and make an arrogant attitude, a gesture. I think Dieter Roth could not have done it because he was not a painter. You have to become a painter and hold your head out the window. You have to give it an importance, and I did that, so that’s why I could do it.

 Output 2, 2003

his ballsyness and he's ability to take his painting seriously w/out taking himself too seriously is what i love about him. from the monograph from the retrospective 1988 - 2004, Self portrait at 50 million times the speed of light:

Q: You once stated that everything you had said more than five years ago was nonsense. Why do your interviews have such a short life?

A: Generally I feel prompted to adopt some position or other as a reaction to something which is happening at the time or as a reaction to the questions. But really I don't have any attitude that could be recounted thrillingly, at least not by me. I just don't reflect that much about the meaning of my work.

 39,90, 2008

Jigga, 2008

Ice, 2008