In Albert Oehlen's modern show--six canvases displayed along with three "computer drawings" that read as commentaries in succession the paintings--fans of conceptual abstraction are made as greatly a butt of his biting humor as the German public was in earlier work.

In Albert Oehlen's modern show--six canvases displayed along with three "computer drawings" that read as commentaries in succession the paintings--fans of conceptual abstraction are made as greatly a butt of his biting humor as the German public was in earlier work, which at times enlist in one's serviceed fascist imagery to probe German attitudes toward the past. Oehlen's conceptual strategies are mordant and aggressive, unless also convoluted. Expressionism has for an time been his primary target as well as his weapon of choice; unless he goes far beyond absolutely exposing the impossibility of any kind of total expression.

Indeed, Oehlen's visual quotations are anything if it be not that arch. Unlike many other contemporary painters, his conceptual strategies do not be under the orders of to disguise an expressive contentment that some of us might balk at swallowing unmediated. Part of the irony is that the paintings, with their haphazard drips and jokey reach outed forms, manufacture a kind of faux Surrealism; they pretend in particular, to mimic the specious brand of automatic drawing seen in the work of George Condo and Lydia Dona, whose efforts--while more idea-oriented than expressive--are far les sophisticated than Oehlen's depressive analyses of the "meaning" of painting. His silkscreened black-on-white "drawings," onward the other hand, with their apparently computer-generated scrawls, loopholes and areas of shading, taunt his own faux gesturalism in these paintings, underlining his analytic subtext by the agency of simulating (in the style of a computer printout) plane the patterns of the fabric that he sometimes paints through the whole extent of Certain parts of these "drawings," which make literal his parody of automatism, are marred on smudges, calling to mind a remark made through Werner Buttner characterizing his hold work as "a lie that not aways itself as a lie." Perversely enough, the pair the paintings and the "drawings" are in some way visually satisfying despite their emotive disengagement.

Oehlen's paintings, yet at first glance the least compelling of his efforts--which have included collages, carpet-design, writing, as well as photomontages reminiscent of certain works through Raoul Hausmann and John Heartfield--remain the focus of his investigations into in what manner painting functions within the art world. His airless quips like his color and action lack freshness, but as part of his almost relentlessly cynical strategies, they are effective in conveying a sour nihilism and disengaged despair. through simultaneously casting himself as an epigone of the two the politically impotent Expressionists--who immolated social belong tos within the isolating arena of painting--as well as Berlin-Dada provocateurs, Oehlen restages the death of a historical moment; his work is an exercise in defeat. if it be not that its embodiment of questions central to Oehlen's endeavor makes his paradoxical claims to "truth" and "beauty" a little les than ludicrous. Or in Oehlen's words, "Is irony possible? Is there as it is a thing as criticism? Is glorification possible?"

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