Albert Oehlen’s canvases may look as if they were uproarious fun to paint, but it turns out that that’s far from the case. “I’ve never felt that,” the German painter tells me. “Maybe I do a little now, after all this time, but when I started, I felt the opposite – disgust. Even now, it’s never a pleasure for me to hold the brush.”
Oehlen came to prominence in the 1990s, a period during which painting appeared to be in terminal decline in the face of competition from conceptual, installation and video art. Combining free-form use of computers and industrial-scale digital printers with wildly expressive daubing in oils, his works felt like they’d been through the long-predicted “death of painting” and come out the other side – an approach The New Yorker described as “post-painting”. Yet for all his pioneering use of computers, Oehlen says he “just hates” the internet. “It’s dirt. If your life is a building, which floor is the internet? I think anyone would say it’s the basem*nt.”
Oehlen, now 69, is no newcomer to contrarianism. In the 1980s, he was part of a group of punkish “bad boy” artists, whose beer- and amphetamine-fuelled antics turned the staid German art scene on its head. He and his fellow art conspirators, the painter Werner Büttner and the multimedia prankster Martin Kippenberger – the nearest thing Germany has had to a Damien Hirst – would invade gallery openings and bawl out coal-miners’ songs.
Kippenberger would pose in oversized underpants in homage to his hero Picasso, who was famously photographed painting in such garments. The trio were seen as rebelling against the high seriousness of much postwar German art – typified by the heavily symbolic imagery of Joseph Beuys and Anselm Kiefer.
Oehlen’s deliberately cackhanded “bad paintings”, as he called them, lit up the art market, as a refreshing alternative to the austerity of the then-dominant conceptualism and minimalism. (One sold for £6 million at Sotheby’s in 2019.)
![The man who made a fortune from ‘bad art’: ‘Some of my paintings are crap. So what?’ (1) The man who made a fortune from ‘bad art’: ‘Some of my paintings are crap. So what?’ (1)](https://i0.wp.com/www.telegraph.co.uk/content/dam/art/2024/04/05/TELEMMGLPICT000371104848_17123294637680_trans_NvBQzQNjv4BqyuLFFzXshuGqnr8zPdDWXhbQKbwj1ZsnNMhuR7O6ySI.jpeg?imwidth=350)
Approaching 70, does Oehlen still feel like a bad boy? Cutting a serious, rather shy figure via Zoom from Los Angeles, where he’s on holiday with his family, Oehlen chuckles drily at the idea he might ever have been such a thing. “Some evenings got a little… extended,” he says, looking back on those pranks. “But the important things for me were sitting together talking and exchanging ideas.”
There’s an impish humour beneath Oehlen’s earnestness. Having read that in every interview he gives the opposite answer to the one given in his last interview, I’m starting to wonder whether I should take anything he says seriously. Bluffing, after all, is his artistic speciality. “When I started painting as a teenager,” he says, “I was very interested in politics, so it seemed obvious that a painting should convey a message. But it took just two or three paintings for me to realise that I didn’t believe in representation. So that meant I must be an abstract painter. But I came to realise that what interested me most were the clichés of abstract painting: the idea that the artist is expressing their emotional identity when they put the brush to canvas. I thought, how can I play with these things? How can I mess them up?”
The viewer’s perceptions may feel messed up looking at the paintings in Oehlen’s new exhibition at Gagosian, in London, in which elements of landscape merge with abstract grids, and strange moustachioed faces peer out of swarms of richly coloured brushstrokes. While he has for the time being abandoned the digital in favour of pure paint, there’s a free-Googling randomness to these paintings that’s strangely exhilarating. “People think of art in terms of originality,” he says, “but I’ve always been interested in its artificiality.”
"Albert Oehlen: New Paintings," is on view at Gagosian, Grosvenor Hill, London, through May 11: https://t.co/gxOy8I3vVJ pic.twitter.com/kBqBLeFhGP
— Gagosian (@Gagosian) April 4, 2024
A graphic-designer’s son from Krefeld, near Düsseldorf, Oehlen studied at Hamburg’s University of Fine Arts. While he grew up in the shadow of the Second World War, he and other artists of his generation – born in the 1950s – have been seen as wanting to shake off the weight of history, and the overpowering sense of guilt evident in the work of many older German artists.
“We were against the self-important attitudes of some artists,” says Oehlen, becoming entirely serious for a moment. “They approached history in a way we felt had become bombastic and kitsch. But I didn’t want to distance myself from dealing with this history at all. I’m German, and when I learnt in school about German history in the 20th century, that was a shock – for life. Even if you don’t see it in my work, it’s a project: what can you do after the Holocaust?”
Still, there must have been fun as well as soul-searching on the Berlin scene. Kippenberger’s anarchic spirit was clearly an influence on Oehlen, particularly his bad paintings – along with all that beer and speed. He laughs. “I drank beer, for sure, but I never needed speed, because I already have it in me. But it was 90 per cent Kippenberger’s show, and we went along with it.” The larger-than-life Kippenberger mocked the idea of the tragic genius, while feeling obliged to live out the archetype through heavy drinking, contributing to his own death, aged 44, in 1997. Oehlen threw himself into his painting, producing a series of deliberately clunky self-portraits, one of which, Self-Portrait as a Dutch Woman, Kippenberger paid the compliment of claiming that not even he could have painted that badly.
![The man who made a fortune from ‘bad art’: ‘Some of my paintings are crap. So what?’ (2) The man who made a fortune from ‘bad art’: ‘Some of my paintings are crap. So what?’ (2)](https://i0.wp.com/www.telegraph.co.uk/content/dam/art/2024/04/05/TELEMMGLPICT000371105161_17123304587320_trans_NvBQzQNjv4BqyuLFFzXshuGqnr8zPdDWXhbQKbwj1ZsnNMhuR7O6ySI.jpeg?imwidth=350)
I was surprised to note that the publicity for Oehlen’s new London exhibition revives the notion. Oehlen, we are told, champions “self-consciously amateurish ‘bad’ painting, infusing spontaneous and expressive gestures with surrealist attitude”. I assumed he would have moved on from that posture in the early 1980s, after “bad painting”, which was briefly a much-publicised – and much-derided – phenomenon, seemed to vanish without trace.
“The term always fascinated me,” Oehlen says. “Over the years, I thought, what happened to that? Because I liked the contradiction of the idea. So I thought I might produce more examples of it myself.” But is it even possible to do a “bad painting” now? Who would decide what bad painting is, when any sense of a standard in art has become even more diffuse than it was when Oehlen started doing bad paintings in the 1980s?
“Maybe bad painting could mean being against the rules. That’s a cause I would sign up to right away. We think now there are no rules in art. But still too many people, artists and audiences, believe in them.” But what are the rules in art today? “I can’t put it into words. But you feel it all the time.”
The recent upsurge in identity-driven art has given rise to an odd sort of cosiness, whereby if an artist’s work ticks the right boxes, it will be accepted. With this has come a revival in narrative painting, much of it twee, and a world away from Oehlen’s work. Among the paintings in the Gagosian show are several featuring discernible trees and sky, inspired by a film he has made on Van Gogh, for which he created the paintings – though his approach wasn’t conventional. “I was aware when I was painting them that these paintings were totally worthless. So I was able to ignore the possibility of making ‘art’. And that’s a fortunate situation to be in. The work gets looser, fresher. Some of these paintings are total crap. But who cares? They could be the source of a good painting.”
‘Albert Oehlen: New Paintings’ is at Gagosian Grosvenor Hill, London W1, until May 11. Info: gagosian.com