Albert Oehlen, Serpentine Gallery

I aproached Albert Oehlen's new exhibition with excitement as I am a fan of Oehlen’s work, and his paintings have informed my own in various ways. Dan Coombs and I have discussed the skill in which Oehlen avoids the centre of his paintings, allowing all the separate elements to dance around it, and keep a relatively quiet space at the core. The importance of this is related to composition, Oehlen’s paintings exude the energy of chaos and abandon, but in reality, they have a very carefully ordered structure that keeps all the elements in motion and not trapped into a grid of horizontals and verticals. The reason for not placing a weighty mark in the centre of a piece is because if one did, that mark would completely dominate the whole piece, the viewer would be immediately drawn to it and would zone in to the centre of the bullseye, leaving the rest of the piece more or less unobserved. The trick in a good painting is to keep the eye moving, a flowing movement that allows the viewer to take in the entire piece. This is something I have observed in a few other painters, namely Willem De Kooning and Cy Twombly and I have continued to work on in my own paintings. This looseness of composition is key in removing the awkwardness of a composition and I have discussed it in my notes on my own practice under the heading of ‘breaking the grid’.

 Oehlen’s abstract paintings have the rhythm of a buoyant piece of music and dazzle us with the variety of different painterly techniques. He mixes hard lines with soft edges, brush marks with spray paint, and dark colours against light. He uses a modern palette of colours that have only become possible to create with modern chemicals. One device he uses is to have large elements of blurring in amongst the other solid marks, which forms a kind of blind spot. I can see how his work developed from its punk-painting beginnings, the rebelliousness and risk-taking has carried over from his figurative work to his abstract, but now the energetic grit is guided by a proper understanding of painting and formal elements.

This new collection of work at the Serpentine, however, does not impress me in the same way his previous work has. The collection is pockmarked with a new motif: a figurative and comical depiction of a moustached man. Perhaps it is simply a taste thing, but the new motif seems to do nothing but throw the viewer off. It isn’t a good drawing in any sense and gives the air of an artist who doesn’t care very much about the piece. There is still some of the usual ingredients of a good Oehlen painting surrounding the motif in a few of the rooms, although the colour palette doesn’t have the electric taste it usually does. The paint is quite muddy and dull in lots of the pieces, and the canvases look overworked in a few cases.

Once the viewer has circled the gallery and seen the large landscape format paintings in the satellite rooms, we step into the central space of the Serpentine. With a very high ceiling and natural light pouring in from above, the room is perfect for large pieces, only the pieces don’t hold enough weight to grace the room. They are huge charcoal drawings on paper, sparingly drawn with only a few lines. Again, it’s the moustached man motif. Repeated over and over, with not much in the way of interesting mark-making or texture, and no colour or depth whatsoever. It feels like an artist with the privilege of money and space has chucked together some work as an experiment of ‘what if’, which is perfectly justified in its creation, but an experiment that should have never left the studio. The show has glimpses of Oehlen’s strengths, but unfortunately it just doesn’t appeal to me as a particularly interesting collection of work.