This Is Just A Mess:Albert Oehlen @ the Serpentine Gallery.

"If someone stands in front of one of my paintings and says "'this is just a mess'" the word 'just' is not so good, but 'mess' might be right". - Albert Oehlen.

Grunaug - Dunkelaug (1997)

It's hard to argue with Albert Oehlen's assessment of his own work, recently available to look at (for free) at the rather lovely Serpentine Gallery in Kensington Gardens. It's certainly messy, and intentionally so, though there are themes and motifs that seem to recur which suggest it's not an accidental mess. Bulbous eyes, stripes, grids, and, most of all, moustaches. Proper wacky Salvador Dali moustaches too. But why?

I wasn't sure. His blurring of abstraction and figuration is hardly new but that's not to say it's not fun. Or that it's rubbish art. It's okay. It's pleasant to look at. But it's hard to work out why it would have earned Albert Oehlen a reputation as one of Germany's leading artists or an exhibition at an august institution like the Serpentine.

Abgaskopf (1998/1984)

Mind you, they put some odd stuff on. Oehlen is far from the oddest they've had. From 1978 to 1981 Oehlen studied at the Hochschule für bildende Künste Hamburg under Sigmar Polke and you can certainly see traces of Polke's scratches, scribbles, and daubs in Oehlen's work. But Oehlen seems to have developed his own more cartoonish style.

Although they'd probably scare a lot of kids some of these images could be jolly pirates, mad professors, or end of level bosses from the era of the Commodore 64 or the ZX Spectrum. The more worked up ones that is. Others simply look like preliminary sketches for the larger works and, as such, added little to the overall experience.

Untitled (2019)

Sohn von Hundescheisse (1999)

An der Ampel (1998)

Creepy clowns, garage doors covered with spray paint, and the result of a game of consequences played with a half-asleep android after two bottles of Nightnurse come to mind as you try to make sense of Oehlen's half-frightful, half-playful paintings. Some made by hand. Some generated by a computer which I like to think Oehlen made himself. A Frankenstein's monster of circuit boards and random access memory.

The large central space of the Serpentine is given over to  Oehlen's interpretation of the Rothko Chapel in Houston, Texas - though I'd take my hat off to anyone who could work that out without reading the information board as you enter the exhibition space that tells you so.

terrible sunset (2019)

Obstruct Reality (2019)

If it reminded me of anything it was more Picasso, Guernica era Picasso, than Rothko or his fellow travellers. Rothko is serene, meditative, whereas Oehlen, like Picasso or even Jackson Pollock (if you're looking for a better abstract analogue), is anything but tranquil. His art is all energy, angles, restlessness, and impatience. 

Ultimately, Oehlen's art, to me, was frustrating. Cy Twombly with a party hat on. Salvador Dali after a week long bender. Picasso on auto-pilot. Oehlen simply reminded me of other, mostly better, artists and that's, surely, not his intention. I liked the gridlike structure of Vorfahrt fur immer and I was mildly tickled by the Heath Robinson style apparatus on terrible sunset, but for the most part I was a little underwhelmed.

Vorfahrt fur immer (1998)

Das Privileg/ZAT (1999)

I'm not one who goes to galleries to be underwhelmed and I'm not a fan of turning in negative reviews. Hopefully this isn't too much of one. Just an honest assessment of what, for me, was at best a distraction. Maybe a larger retrospective, or some much needed explanation, will mean that one day I'll see that I was wrong about Albert Oehlen but, for now, and for me, this show was far more of a cold mess than a hot mess - and that's not the kind of mess I'm into.

Im Ruckspiegel (1998/1982)

120 kmh (1998)

Thanks to Valia for accompanying me to this exhibition (she'd only wanted to go to the even more bonkers Patrick Staff one across the Serpentine at the Sackler but I dragged her into this one too) and thanks to her, also, for some slightly rusty German translations.