Viewing Room | Untitled by Albert Oehlen

1 - 30 April 2023

Albert Oehlen. Untitled, 2017
Oil on canvas, 230 x 180 cm
"A color chart is a starting point for a painting, but it's also a way of exploring the possibilities of color and the relationships between colors."

— Albert Oehlen

The emergence of abstract painting had a major impact on classical color theory, representing its applied meaning as well as its role in conceptual perception. It also became a pivotal moment in Albert Oehlen's career as the artist shifted into abstraction, implicitly parodied the idea of the artist's struggle by juxtaposing chaotic passages with highly controlled and mediated ones.
Original 1960s sample card for enamel paint from Ducolux

Albert Oehlen's series of color charts inspired by the systematization of industrial paint samples initiated by Gerhard Richter back in the middle of the last century. These attempts to arrange the infinite color palette into an artistic form through honed color selection, turn a simple constructive geometric language into a way of representing artist’s ideas and creating metaphors of the modern world.
A scrutiny of paint as a conceptual subject of artistic exploration can be traced back to Marcel Duchamp and his proposition in a 1963 interview that paint, made by a manufacturer constitutes a ready-made. Hence the painter, using paints produced by a manufacturer was “readymade-aided”.
Marcel Duchamp. 'Tu m'', 1918 © Yale University Art Gallery
The moment in twentieth-century art, when a group of artists began to perceive color as ‘readymade’ rather than as scientific or expressive became a turning point in artistic practices. Their work set a radical transformation in the post-War Western art that was characterised by the departure from such notions as originality, uniqueness and authenticity.
Exhibition view – Cows by the Water, Albert Oehlen, Palazzo Grassi, Venice, 2008

© Palazzo Grassi
This redefinition of patterns created a new system, a kind of color periodic table. The grids became both a challenge and an exploration of a new theory that captivated many artists such as – Gerhard Richter, Ellsworth Kelly, Frank Stella, Blinky Palermo, Daniel Richter, Damien Hirst and many others.
Untitled, 2017 (detail) © Gary Tatintsian Gallery and the artist

In his concept, Oehlen breaks down the palette not from white, as is common to the laws of physics, but from gray, as the color in which all other possible shades are enclosed. The color chart that moves from what we might call grey to blue to brown to white showing that, in fact, any color might be grey if seen in the right light.

"Gray is a color that can convey a sense of ambiguity, of things that are neither black nor white, but somewhere in between."

— Albert Oehlen
Presenting color as object, color charts works by Albert Oehlen deliver an intense analysis of the fundamental principles of artistic practice, namely that of paint and pigment. The random allocation of color into the squares eliminates the hierarchy of both color and compositional theory, focusing on the materiality of paint as the core subject.
- Artworks
  Albert Oehlen
  Untitled, 2017
  Oil on canvas
  230 × 180 cm
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