Mission Rohrfrei

Albert Oehlen cites Tramonto Spaventoso, a painting produced around 1940 by John Graham (1886–1961), as the inspiration for the group to which this painting belongs. A somewhat forgotten artist and figure, yet central to the history of American art in the 1940s and 1950s, he was rightly regarded by Pollock and other Abstract Expressionists as a mentor. For his ‘John Graham Remix’ series, the artist used this canvas as a theme, referencing some of its figurative or graphic elements, or echoing the broad outlines of its composition. Given Oehlen’s focus on music, one might say that the process is akin to that of a jazz musician improvising around a standard.

Oehlen’s historical iconoclasm – a tribute to an artist who was pivotal to the most influential artist of the second half of the 20th century – takes the form of a flamboyant painting (like a sunset?) in which he imposes no restrictions on style or technique, drawing on both digital tools and spray paint. He is unrestrained, true to his maxim that ‘to improve something, you must repaint it, paint over it, take the painting further’. The work is composed of layers, ‘transparencies’ that are superimposed upon one another, simultaneously revealing and obscuring, in a manner rather akin to a composition created by computer software.

The painting, dating from the mid-1990s, epitomises the vitality of the formal and technical innovations of a painter who had by then reached maturity, transcending the antagonisms between figuration and abstraction that he had sought to explore in the very late 1980s.

Mission Rohrfrei is the German title of Down Periscope, a 1990s American comedy set on a submarine – a wholly incongruous reference that steers the painting into a new sea of meaning, in keeping with a device frequently employed by the artist.