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B. 1954
KRANKE LÜGE

signed and dated 87

oil on canvas

PROVENANCE



Galerie Grässlin, Frankfurt
Acquired directly from the above by the present owner in 1990



NOTE

Every generation of artists has its masters: in the 80s and 90s it was Albert Oehlen and Martin Kippenberger. Heirs to the legacy of Polke, Baselitz and Richter, they exploited the freedom of painting they had inherited and sought to challenge the boundaries of image, material and the falsehood of 'high' art.

Kranke Luge ('Sick Lies') is a seminal work that marks a breakthrough moment in Oehlen's career. It affords the starting point of simultaneous abstraction of figurative and abstract modes of painting: what he termed 'post-non-figurative painting'. This style of painting was to set the path for his work over the subsequent decades and also prove hugely influential on an emerging generation of young German artists.

Having already proved his own academic mastery of space and colour, Kranke Luge reflects Oehlen's desire to subvert the decorous and stuffy in art. Exaggerating and distorting the traditions and rules of representation, the present work revels in its deliberate anti-aesthetic to communicate a picture of visual breakdown. Oehlen distorts depth and perspective and deliberately encourages failure through chance effects that shatter the illusion of space. Deliberately rebelling against the moralistic and aesthetic pretensions of earlier German post-war artists and their attempts to come to terms with the Nazi past, it engenders his bleakly ironic and provocative style of painting. Drawing on the works of Martin Kippenberger, a close friend, colleague and artistic collaborator, Oehlen's colour scheme is deliberately drab -- rusts, browns and blacks mixing with discoloured whites. These colours are layered over each other in bold, loose brushstrokes whilst the perspective is purposefully obscured, leaving the viewer with as little chance as possible to "read" the painting. Here the 'non-image' is accompanied by gibberish textual illusions to repressed Germanic history -- lies a 'sick' as the pictorial conventions that Oehlen decimates here.

LITERATURE

Wilfried Dickhoff, Ed., Kunst Heute Bd. 7: Albert Oehlen, Cologne 1991, p. 56, illustrated in colour