Viewing Room | Untitled (Baum 44) by Albert Oehlen

"What reasons can you have to move left, right, straight, or in circles? There are many answers to that. And then I saw the trees doing that in a way, the winter tree that I choose. They have the freedom to make any move. And so they are a kind of model of abstraction."

—Albert Oehlen

In his studies of abstract painting, Oehlen has not completely abandoned the elements of figurative imagery. Consequently, the elegantly detailed illusory of the "Tree Paintings" is a complex fusion of two opposing pictorial practices, which, when combined, do not antagonize one another, but rather complement the integral visual composition.

Floating within the picture plane, bare and leafless tree trunk with its tangled branches depicted on white ground, next to the blocks of magenta colour gradations is devoid of any of the natural environments found in traditional landscape painting, calling into question the very essence of nature.

In the painted, spray-painted and screen printed lines, the textural mechanical forms collide with the hand-made gestures. Instead of using the canvas as a foundation for his work, Oehlen applied oil on aluminum-coated panels. On the surface of the Dibond, the geometrical tree lines seem to be digitally manufactured, and only upon a closer look appear to be elegantly rendered painting works.

"They are more simple and more complicated now. Qualities that I want to see brought together: delicacy and coarseness, color and vagueness, and, underlying them all, a base note of hysteria."

—Albert Oehlen