The Taschen Collection: Art of our time
By Marga Paz
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Förg applied this same practice in his painting, which he began at the end of the 1970s, experimenting with abstraction and using monochromatic paints, serialization processes and a wide variety of materials. In doing so, he managed to go beyond the limited terrain of exploration in painting that had been strictly established by Clement Greenberg. These limits had been maintained until the 1970s, when the advent of Pop Art highlighted the bankruptcy and sterility of Greenberg's model of painting, which was merely capable of talking about itself and not about the world, which was the aim at the time.
Their radically critical and demythologizing stance toward art, politics, life and painting in particular prevented Oehlen, Kippenberger and Büttner from being assimilated into the socalled "wild painters" in the early 1980s. These artists offered an alternative to this category of painters of their generation, who had emerged in Germany with the aim of establishing a neo-Expressionist re-assessment of painting as a medium. Those Expressionist impulses, characterized by more or less ambitious romantic approaches, were aimed at restoring the subjective effect of authorship by means of the particular conventions and codes of representation. On the other hand, Kippenberger, Oehlen and Büttner distanced themselves from any form of pathos, humor, irony and games with visual vernaculars when they decided to return to painting, to which they devoted more of their attention as time went by. Paradoxically, this shift occurred after they had learned the tenets of conceptualism as practised by those artists of the prior generation, who had categorically rejected painting; or from others such as Jörg Immendorff, who had used the medium to convey extreme left-wing political propaganda.
The manipulation of visual codes and vernaculars is particularly explicit in the work of Albert Oehlen, whose career has been characterized by a diversity styles. His incessant drive to explore new terrain between abstraction and figuration has broadened the pictorial field by other means, adding to it and emptying it of contents, meanings and motifs.
Christopher Wool, too, decided to devote himself to painting in 1981. Typical of his generation of American artists, he viewed his appropriation of the medium as a possible critical and subversive vehicle. As a result, on both sides of the Atlantic, these German and American artists were able to approach painting afresh. Employing the same critical stance with which they acknowledged the end of painting, a new path had opened up that proclaimed painting's ability to experience new discourses.
Page [1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6] [7] [8] [9] [10] [11] [12] [13]
Page [1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6] [7] [8] [9] [10] [11] [12] [13]
Förg applied this same practice in his painting, which he began at the end of the 1970s, experimenting with abstraction and using monochromatic paints, serialization processes and a wide variety of materials. In doing so, he managed to go beyond the limited terrain of exploration in painting that had been strictly established by Clement Greenberg. These limits had been maintained until the 1970s, when the advent of Pop Art highlighted the bankruptcy and sterility of Greenberg's model of painting, which was merely capable of talking about itself and not about the world, which was the aim at the time.
Their radically critical and demythologizing stance toward art, politics, life and painting in particular prevented Oehlen, Kippenberger and Büttner from being assimilated into the socalled "wild painters" in the early 1980s. These artists offered an alternative to this category of painters of their generation, who had emerged in Germany with the aim of establishing a neo-Expressionist re-assessment of painting as a medium. Those Expressionist impulses, characterized by more or less ambitious romantic approaches, were aimed at restoring the subjective effect of authorship by means of the particular conventions and codes of representation. On the other hand, Kippenberger, Oehlen and Büttner distanced themselves from any form of pathos, humor, irony and games with visual vernaculars when they decided to return to painting, to which they devoted more of their attention as time went by. Paradoxically, this shift occurred after they had learned the tenets of conceptualism as practised by those artists of the prior generation, who had categorically rejected painting; or from others such as Jörg Immendorff, who had used the medium to convey extreme left-wing political propaganda.
The manipulation of visual codes and vernaculars is particularly explicit in the work of Albert Oehlen, whose career has been characterized by a diversity styles. His incessant drive to explore new terrain between abstraction and figuration has broadened the pictorial field by other means, adding to it and emptying it of contents, meanings and motifs.
Christopher Wool, too, decided to devote himself to painting in 1981. Typical of his generation of American artists, he viewed his appropriation of the medium as a possible critical and subversive vehicle. As a result, on both sides of the Atlantic, these German and American artists were able to approach painting afresh. Employing the same critical stance with which they acknowledged the end of painting, a new path had opened up that proclaimed painting's ability to experience new discourses.
Page [1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6] [7] [8] [9] [10] [11] [12] [13]
Taschen Collection
Hardcover, 29.7 x 42 cm (11.7 x 16.5 in.), 254 pages
$ 70.00
$ 70.00
The Benedikt Taschen Collection on show at Reina Sofía
TASCHEN Store Los Angeles, designed by Philippe Starck and with 20 collages by Albert Oehlen inspired by various Taschen publications. Foto: Taschen, Tim Street-Porter, 2003