Albert Oehlen's genius

If paintings were guests at a dinner party, Albert Oehlen’s would be the most popular raconteurs. Everyone would clamor to sit next to them, leaving the rest of the paintings sulking at the end of the table by themselves. His current exhibition at the New Museum, “Home and Garden,” curated by Massimiliano Gioni, with Gary Carrion-Murayari and Natalie Bell, seems too intimate – I would have preferred a bigger party with twice as many guests. Nevertheless, the show is a tour de force, full of robust irony, dynamic observation, art-historical allusions, and painterly brio. One installation and twenty-seven canvases, spanning his 35-year career, embody manic duels of line, shape, color, texture, and image. The paintings don’t necessarily fit together in some larger plan; their impact and significance lies in the process each reveals, the energy it emits, and its unfettered wit.


At 60, Oehlen isn’t a worrier. For him painting isn’t about developing a distinctive style or thinking too deeply about a particular shape or line; to the contrary, it’s about creating something unexpected and taking painting somewhere new. He works with simple guidelines, such as “paint slower,” and then he teases them out, making choices based on that idea. "Originally my pictures were very impulsive...I used to think, the easiest thing is to paint fast, and the appropriate result will automatically follow," he told Jorg Heiser and Jan Verwoert in a 2003 Frieze Magazine interview. "Then it occurred to me: why not paint slowly? [laughs] It sounds awfully banal but it had a great many consequences."

 Walking through the New Museum exhibition, I imagined how he worked each canvas, patiently layering element after element, until something surprising happened. For all their flamboyance, Oehlen’s paintings are disciplined and authoritative. He knows when to quit and move on to a different canvas and address a new problem, or perhaps to approach the same problem from a different direction. He stops while the painting is still fresh, before it loses the force of spontaneity and becomes agonizingly chewed-over.