Albert Oehlen’s “Computer Images”: Sarcastic Slowdown

Anyone who remembers when the word “pixel” came out is probably retiring soon. These cube points, which were first encountered in early graphics programs and computer games, defined the turning point when the grid learned to run. Back then, printers and designers could still scoff at the laborious quarry of ambition that PCs displayed on their initially green-black screens. But they soon stopped laughing. During this time, Albert Oehlen purchased a laptop from Texas Instruments, a promising home computing company.

In 1990, the then Neue Wilde, who had just made ironic painting the new mainstream of cool German art with Martin Kippenberger and Werner Büttner, tried out the disappointing possibilities of digital image creation. For Oehlen, the graphics program of the heavy computer, which depicted lines as stairs and made the representation of objects look like bathroom decor made of mosaic tiles, deserved an ironic treatment. He had the embryonic stage of digital design printed enlarged on fabric and then crushed it. Computer art in oil on canvas.

Priority of the defective

35 years later, these postcard motifs from the early days of electronic image processing are collected as a series for the first time and exhibited in the Hamburger Kunsthalle. In the format of historical battle paintings, the flat black blocks, painted over with a few calligraphic gestures, appear unique, but also a bit avant-garde bland. Without prior knowledge, they passed off as experimental scores for new music. And yet the “Computer Pictures” series of works represents a few threshold moments for several reasons – in the development of the digital, art and in Oehlen’s personal career.

Oehlen’s teacher at the University of Fine Arts in Hamburg, Sigmar Polke, had already introduced grid dots as a stylistic device for outrageous painting in the 1960s. He used classic print foils of his comic or photo motifs in high resolution and projected them onto the canvas in order to then paint them with real hard work – which became a central hallmark of his art. His talented student marked the next step into new times with his “computer images” by creating material-free motifs using future technology, but then having them printed classically in order to then use them as the basis for a traditional painterly reaction with the brush.

This recoding of Polke’s raster images not only represents a moment of emancipation from the all-powerful teacher, but also a comment on the euphoria for acceleration and efficiency that was associated with the advent of popular computers in the eighties. By sarcastically slowing down the image process over several stages and presenting the digital photographs as sloppily overpainted and intentionally poorly composed oil paintings, Oehlen gave priority to human flaw over the longing for perfection.

But at the same time, with this act of stripping the computer of any quality, Oehlen drew a boundary between the genres that has subsequently proven itself: computer art and painting have remained autonomous areas in art to this day, which rarely get in each other’s way. The ancient human work of patiently putting images on canvas has lost as little of its power as it did with the introduction of earlier imaging processes, such as photography, film or television. The eternal prophecy that painting was dead did not come true, even with the total triumph of the Internet.

Caustic mockery of bourgeoisie

For Albert Oehlen’s development as an artist, this series also marks the final change from a figurative to an abstract painter. And with it the farewell to “meaning”. The postmodern pop painter, who previously captured the spirit of the times with caustic mockery of stuffiness, repression and affluence, still retains something of the rebellious attitude of bad painting in his computer images. But from here the many different groups of works developed that Albert Oehlen, who recently turned 70, created in his search for the paintable. The gray pictures, the tree series or the continuation of Abstract Expressionism, with which Oehlen finally became an art world star, breathe the spirit of this moment of not wanting to say anything anymore.

With 20 large-format examples, the exhibition, curated by Kunsthalle director Alexander Klar, also shows how Oehlen said goodbye to the austere black and white aesthetic of the first reaction in a second phase of working with the pixel templates in the noughties. The largest picture in the exhibition, seven meters wide, “Annihilator,” which Oehlen painted in 2001 and reworked again in 2006, is stylistically a cross between Willem de Kooning’s colorful color worlds and Polke’s image experiments based on digital-analog mixing in Texas instruments. The opulent collage of patterns, dynamic movements, fabrics and graphics suddenly creates a depth and variety of associations that connect Oehlen’s computer experiment more closely with the rest of his work.

This is where the desire to look finally arises, to linger in front of the multi-layered chaos, against which the original black and white deserts of pixels seem very much like the lesson of an artist who absolutely wants to formulate a change. With the result that although the idea and the process seem very original, the painted results appear brittle to the point of unfriendly. On the impossible artist’s journey to an image that no longer means anything, this gesture of knowledge paradoxically takes on, above all, a historical significance.

Albert Oehlen: Computer images. Hamburg Art Gallery. Until March 2, 2025.