Artist Birthday: Albert Oehlen

Albert Oehlen was part of a German artistic movement Junge Wilde (Young Wild ones) in the 1980s, the rebelled against the conformity of “modernism” in such movements as Minimalism, Conceptualism and Postmodernism. He engages with the history of abstract painting, pushing the basic components of abstraction to new extremes.

Artist Birthday for 17 September: Albert Oehlen (born 1954 Germany)

Albert Ohelen, Dinge ( Objects ), 1987, color linoleum cut on paper, folded and houses in slipcase with linoleum cut on paper on front, 50 x 49.8 cm The Museum of Modern Art, New York, © 2025 Albert Oehlen / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York (MOMA-P3030oears)

Dinge (Objects) represents Oehlen's constant crossing from one aesthetic ideal to another all in one work of art. The jagged lettering and staring self-portrait may reflect the influence of German Expressionist prints. The contrast of imagery with words may also reflect, with its philosophical statement, a distant connection to Conceptual art and the importance of the word. Oehlen's rejection of the status quo in "modernism" or the late 1900s was equaled by his rejection of the values of the German (and Western) middle classes: overt consumerism, coveting of objects (Dinge), and craving for status.

Text -- are they who rule and are young are who drive out and replace one another

Background

For most of the 1900s, painting remained, in the West, the primary vehicle for the development of modernism. From the early developments of Expressionism and Cubism to the triumphant advent of Abstract Expressionism, painting was hailed as most critics' vision of the perfect medium for the expression of modernist ideas. Even movements that questioned the conventions of painting -- such as the Dadaists and Surrealists -- acknowledged, even in their own work, the primacy of painting.

Starting in the 1950s, several movements challenged that primacy, in the movements of Minimalism, Conceptualism, and Postmodernism. Yet, several artists in the last decades of the 1900s persisted in their insistence on painting as one of the most valid modes of personal expression. One of the movements that resurrected the importance of painting was generally called Neo-Expressionism. Working with the slashing brushwork and intense color of German Expressionism, these artists emerged in the 1970s, some of them pursuing abstraction, and others varying degrees of realism.

One of the Neo-Expressionist movements in the 1980s was the group of young artists called Junge Wilde (Young Wild Ones) or Neue Wilde (New Wild Ones). There were centers of the movement in Berlin, Hamburg and Cologne. The artists of this group were connected in aesthetic to the "First Neo-Expressionism" of the 1960s, characterized by the art of Georg Baseltiz (born 1938), A.R. Penck (1937-2017), Markus Lüpertz (born 1941), and others. The group name came from a group show in Aachen called "Neue Wilde" in 1980.

Junge Wilde does not signify a cohesive stylistic movement or group aesthetic. It does not reference wild art, but rather wild young artists. They were all born in the 1950s and were rebels against the manifesto-like conformity of styles that defined modernism at the time such as Minimalism, Conceptualism and Postmodernism. The artists sought to reintroduce a subjective figurative, emotional and narrative form of art.

Oehlen was associated with the Junge Wilde. Born in Krefeld, In the 1970s he studied art at the College for Pictorial Art in Hamburg, where he studied under one of the First Neo-Expressionists, Sigmar Polke (born 1941). Early in Oehlen's career as an artist, the exploration of language, social structures and personal experiences figured prominently in his work. His work, in a broad range of media, has been heavily influenced by Punk subculture and the random, intuitive work of Surrealism.

Although Oehlen associated with many Neo-Expressionists, his work combined figurative and abstract elements that confounded the prevailing Neo-Expressionism. By the end of the 1980s the artist was executing his painted works in total abstraction. He also experimented with computer generated imagery as part of collage-paintings, and designed cd covers for Punk, Post-Punk and Goth bands in the 1990s.

Correlation to Davis program: Experience Printmaking, Chapter 3 Basic Relief