At the opening of the exhibition “the ömen: Albert Oehlen paintings and Paul McCarthy sculptures” a Gagosian New York l’8 marzo 2023 – photo: © Arlette Sarkissians per ARTE.it
This Gagosian-style New Yorker is a colossal and very interesting exhibition. The themes overlap and the viewer is inundated with a multitude of shapes and colors that foreshadow dystopian and grotesque futures in a vision of tomorrow (which is also, however, that of a distorted and imaginative today) which is not without irony in its charge transformative, aestheticizing.
So if Ohelen with his paintings takes us into his strange imagery where the keywords pandemic, science and science fiction mix until they blend in, mirroring them are the gigantic carnival sculptures where McCarthy stages his 90s tabloid-cover imagery.
Interesting operation, very much fashionable however, but which has the advantage of also being aesthetically beautiful and not trivial. Certainly built to perfection – as it is good to do in these times where art and ideology overlap in a creative and transformative activism – to upset what remains of the now stereotypical western white male. Perfect shape to play with with trendy (and increasingly impossible to avoid) themes but guaranteed to be trending topic across all media at least for a while.
The two artists have the advantage of not taking themselves too seriously – unlike the elite who stroll in front of the windows of 555 West 24th street in Manhattan – and therefore are effectively and inevitably destined to leave their mark with this show of theirs.
Oehlen’s works in this exhibition focus on his cryptic motif Ömega Mana genderless humanoid form inspired by the character of the Dr. Robert Neville in the 1971 dystopian sci-fi action film The Omega Man. As the doomed survivor of a global pandemic, Neville in Oehlen’s imagery represents the runaway scientific development that led to the downfall of humanity. In Ömega Man 6 and 7 (both 2021), the out-of-place shape of the figure emerges from the misalignment of two color grids; in other paintings its mottled silhouette is set against a bright yellow background, recalling the combination of sharp lines and rich hues in the artist’s tree paintings. It is also sometimes outlined in blue, red and yellow, or rendered as a masked area of various brushstrokes distinguishable only by its sharply differentiated borders. Oehlen invited McCarthy to participate in the ömen in part to bring out a shared fascination with works that are “on the way to becoming something else” and can exist in multiple forms and versions.
Classic art lover Oehlen uses abstract, figurative and collage elements, often applying self-imposed formal constraints, to disrupt the histories and conventions of modern painting. while acknowledging the continued significance of classical art. Approaching his practice as a perceptual challenge, he moves freely between planned and improvised strategies. And while he consciously defends “bad” painting characterized by crude drawings and strident colors, he infuses the expressive gesture with a surrealist attitudedenigrating the search for stable form and meaning. McCarthy has been known since the 1970s for performances, videos, sculptures and installations that confront viewers with a perverse vision of the Grand Guignol populated by a series of grotesque characters. Pairing a focus on sex and violence with a self-consciously infantile approach to human bodily function, she probes the darkest corners of the American subconscious, exposing its synthetic manifestations in mass media and the built environment. There McCarthy’s clownish and dystopian turn on utopian European actionism it continues to exert a strong influence even today.
The exhibition also reveals other links, including the one between Oehlen’s recent film with Oliver Hirschbiegel, The Painter (2021)and McCarthy’s monumental installation The King (2006-11). In the film, actor Ben Becker plays Oehlen in the process of producing a new work, juxtaposing and confusing moments of frustration and contentment, authenticity and artifice. In McCarthy’s sculptural installation, an elevated platform is surrounded by airbrushed paintings of images from popular magazines, produced by a hired illustrator. Also present, seated on a wooden throne, is a nude, wigged and partially dismembered silicone mannequin modeled on the artist. Elsewhere in the exhibition, McCarthy’s Paula Jones, Melinda (2004-2009) delves deeper and with equally corrosive irony into pervasive misogyny by portraying the first woman to sue Bill Clinton for sexual harassment, while her Henry Moore Foam ( 2004) pays homage to the modernist sculptor through a huge Styrofoam replica of a Moore-inspired work McCarthy produced as a young student. This altered-looking figure – the product of a long process of melting and remelting – echoes the partially abstracted forms in Oehlen’s paintings, again underlining how both artists play with and deconstruct the enduring myth of white male creative heroism.
the ömen
Albert Oehlen paintings and Paul McCarthy sculptures
March 8 – April 22, 2023
555 West 24th Street
New York