The Brooklyn Rail

Picture this: Several quick, delicate taps on a snare drum echo softly in a background. Then a familiar, jazzy melody begins. Cymbals clash. A playful piano counterline enters, teasing with lighter hues. Organ riffs cut in; a darker variation is overlaid upon the initial rhythm. Now allow one of Albert Oehlen’s new paintings in his current exhibition at Max Hetzler’s gallery in Berlin to begin to intone. First, a hand flicks a few drops of paint onto a white canvas. A brush fully loaded with pigment swishes across it leaving a series of modulated streaks. Contrasting patches of color that cohere around them turn dissonant. White paint makes an entrance lightening the composition and creating something akin to an interval. Trills of bold yellow color boom. All of this encapsulates the inherent musicality of a painting such as this. Those in-the-know, will tell you the artist has been pursuing the quest to create works with an overriding audio quality for quite some time now. The painter recently admitted: “What you see in the pictures becomes a kind of sound.” Oehlen is not the first artist to evoke the sensation of sound through paint. Take, for example, the “Sounding Cosmos” of Wassily Kandinsky’s early twentieth century abstractions, which owed much to his friendship with Arnold Schoenberg. A century later Oehlen found his own musical pals—among them, H.P. Baxxter and Wolgang Voigt. It’s no surprise that the works this staunch champion of “bad-painting” went on to make are as far removed from the apocalyptic tones of Kandinsky’s occult-inspired canvases as can be imagined. Instead, they retain the raw, provocative, and rule-breaking brunt of Oehlen’s earlier work. New is the artist’s ability to effectively marshal the language of music into sassy pictorial terms. If these works may be said to be political, then it’s because they also seem to resonate with the tension so characteristic of today’s world.

Three kinds of paintings are showcased. Eight untitled canvases—including the one described above—created between 2023 and 2024 are to be found on the ground floor. Loosely related, hung closely together, and roughly the same size they can be equated with what musicians term “samples.” If we could tune into the frequency on which they are playing, we might hear a mix of trance, ambient, techno and free jazz. Opposite them hang four shaped canvases from Oehlen’s “Omega-Man” series, a body of work he began three years ago. It is likely that the soundtrack of that 1971 Boris Sagal film interested the artist even more than the plot itself. Scored by Ron Grainer, the music includes pieces by composers as diverse as Arlo Guthrie, Thelonious Monk, Cole Porter, and Max Steiner. Also on display downstairs are three sizable aluminum sculptures, with another on the second floor, which feel somewhat extraneous in this otherwise virtuoso exhibition.

While the paintings just discussed serve as a kind of prelude, the four-part work on view in the upstairs gallery, stands as a powerful coda. In all the canvases, the remnants of what was once a grid-structure, now blown wide open, make themselves known. Musicians, as Oehlen is certainly aware, think in terms of grids—a structure they equate with bars, upon which they then hang notes. Not so for art historians for whom the grid “is an emblem of modernity” (R. Krauss), a structure heralded by Cubist aesthetics. With the exhibition’s title Schweinekubismus, Oehlen challenges not only this veneration of the grid, but the very tenets of modernity itself, dismissing its rigid categorizations and hierarchies.

This rejection becomes especially clear in the monumental work on the second floor. Forms dangle from a grid’s skeletal remains, shapes the plucky artist outfits with clashing tonalities of color. Then, out of nowhere the contours of what seems to be a boot reveal themselves. Imaginary or intended, the motif fits perfectly. Once glimpsed it lingers like a recurring phrase in a piece of music. Near its top, a brown line arches across all four canvases, setting another rhythm into play. As if riffing off the sound of a foot stamping on the floor, the forms in each of these canvases seem to dance to their own tempo. Whatever angle you take on this sequence, one thing remains clear: Oehlen has not only expanded the possibilities of painting, but appears poised to push them even further.