Beschreibung:

Property from an Important German Collection34Albert OehlenDie Veränderungensigned and dated 'A. Oehlen 05' on the reverse oil, acrylic and photo-paper collage on canvas 299.5 x 280.4 cm (117 7/8 x 110 3/8 in.) Executed in 2005. Full CataloguingEstimate £700,000 - 900,000 ♠ Place Advance BidContact Specialist Kate Bryan Specialist, Head of Evening Sale +44 20 7318 4026 kbryan@phillips.com
Overview Combining oil paint, collage and two photographic segments, Die Veränderungen displays Albert Oehlen’s formally succinct and eclectic style, which has become known for attending to traditional media and genres only to immediately challenge, twist and subvert them. ‘If almost every major Oehlen is to some degree slung over the bones of a collage’, writes John Kelsey, ‘it’s also true that the painting itself is a collage of different moments and gestures, and that in many cases the moments we would call painterly are often followed and extended by further layers of actual collage’.i With its falsely flat geometric construction – debunked by the presence of overlaid paint and photographic additions – Die Veränderungen deftly exemplifies the artist’s continuous experimentation with both physical and painterly layering, as well as his tendency to revisit previously mounted collages. Specifically, the present work echoes Ursprung Collage 9, a virtually identical small-scale collaged work that Oehlen created in 2003. Included in the artist’s important Vienna Secession show in 2005, Ursprung Collage 9 was subsequently used as a premise for the present work, which Oehlen devised in larger-than-life dimensions. Testament to its importance within the artist’s oeuvre, Die Veränderungen was exhibited at the Kunsthaus Graz, Museum Joanneum, in 2006, and at Kunstraum Grässlin in 2010-2011, on the occasion of two major solo shows. 'Oehlen’s sensibility and calculated practice is very focused on collage. The fragmentation and combination that are aspects of collage figuratively configure his abstract paintings. And now as he literally attached a collage element at the beginning of a painting, the collaged paper and the painted elements became one.'—Klaus Kertess A primordial technique within Oehlen’s practice, collage has constituted the basis of a number of his pictorial manifestations throughout his career. Looking at Oehlen’s myriad small collages dotting his production in the mid-2000s, one is indeed immediately able to discern two themes: grids and rooms. For his gridded compositions, the artist appropriated newspaper or catalogue pages which he visually arranged as blocs or columns of information; for his rooms, he borrowed the contents and structures of homes displayed in lifestyle magazine and furniture advertisements – the result of which was usually interspersed with cut-out figures and various other intruding objects. Belonging to this latter category of collaged works, Die Veränderungen portrays the zoomed-in, altered and rejigged area of a domestic space, facetiously interrupted by a rising white mannequin and mutilated black boot. Recalling Matisse’s cutouts, David Salle’s multi-layered compositions, and myriad other handcrafted formulations, Die Veränderungen presaged a number of Oehlen’s subsequent creations, which continued combining textures and pictorial methods on a single flat plane. Subject-wise, Oehlen moreover returned to the domestic theme in later artistic iterations, namely on the occasion of his seminal solo show entitled Home and Garden at the New Museum, New York, in 2015, where he created an installation comprising a painted self-portrait tucked in a physical bed, haloed by a Vienna Secession exhibition poster on the wall. Positing as a three-dimensional rendition of his Interior series, the Home and Garden installation became a perennial testament to the importance of Die Veränderungen and its sister paintings in Oehlen’s later oeuvre. Giorgio Morandi Large Metaphysical Still Life, 1918, oil on canvas, Pinacoteca di Brera, Milan. Image: Scala Images, Florence. The subject matter at the heart of Die Veränderungen, though not immediately evident to the naked eye, is one that holds significant art-historical precedence. The depicted objects, varying in verisimilitude from true to quasi-abstract, suggest a curated moodboard laid atop the wall of a room – perhaps Oehlen’s vision of an artist’s studio. This