Albert Oehlen - Contemporary Art Evening Sale London Friday, October 12, 2007 | Phillips

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  • Provenance

    Luhring Augustine Gallery, New York

  • Catalogue Essay

    With his thick and vivid brushwork, Albert Oehlen’s Stueck is a prime example of the artist’s newer body of work. Staying loyal to his large scale canvases and vigorous style, Stueck is an amalgamation of figuration and abstraction and a seminal work in the artist’s self-coined period of "post-nonrepresentationalism". Taking on a distinguished colour palette of bright and dark colours, Oehlen has created a monumental painting of vanishing and re-appearing forms. With his chaotic horizontal and vertical brushstrokes, Oehlen deliberately obliterates anything recognisable, placing the canvas in a bubble of uncertainty and differing perceptions.

    Consequently, by obscuring the painting’s surface, his vigorous brushwork only allows the viewer to momentarily decipher any possible subject matter. Oehlen abandons his viewer in what appears to be a collaged surface of paint. With his disjointed pictorial vocabulary, Oehlen literally ‘locks’ his viewers into the painting’s fragmented surface. He presents a web of unobtainable or definite information, yet simultaneously encourages his viewers to appreciate the juxtaposition between figuration and abstraction and the visual pleasure when placed together.

223

Stueck (Piece)

2003
Oil on canvas.
110 x 133 3/4 in. (279.4 x 339.7 cm).
Signed and dated “ A. Oehlen 03” on the reverse.

Estimate
£150,000 - 200,000 ≠♠†

Sold for £144,000

Contemporary Art Evening Sale

Evening Sale
13 October 2007, 4pm
London