Breaking the rules

The German painter Albert Oehlen (born in Krefeld in 1954) is of the same generation as the infamous Martin Kippenberger (1953–97), recently celebrated so lavishly at Tate Modern. They were good friends and collaborated on various projects, including jokey mottoes on ‘I Love…’ stickers and poems. Both were of that group of German artists who turned to joking as a way of dealing with the artist’s predicament in an age of so-called postmodernism. If Kippenberger was the wilder of the two, obsessed with being famous and grabbing headlines for a whole stream of pranks and artistic interventions, Oehlen has gone on to produce an increasingly authoritative body of work after his self-destructive friend’s tragic early death. It’s not exactly a case of the tortoise and the hare, but certainly Oehlen now looks at least as interesting an artist as his more famous compatriot.

At the Whitechapel is the first proper survey of Oehlen’s work in Britain, partnered by a parallel (but strangely not contemporaneous) show at the Arnolfini in Bristol. To get the full Oehlen experience, you doubtless have to visit both exhibitions, which contain very different sorts of work, but for some reason the Arnolfini display doesn’t open until 30 September (and then continues until 26 November). In keeping with the ludic, disruptive and openly contradictory nature of the work, the Bristol show is subtitled ‘I Will Always Champion Bad Painting’. Is this indicative of a desire to have it both ways, or simply an inability to distinguish between the two? That question remains (largely unanswered) at the heart of this work. As Oehlen himself has said, ‘I want an art where you see how it’s made, not what the artist means but the traces of production.’