grau — a collaboration between carsten nicolai and painter/installed artist albert oehlen. following the sound and light installation of the same name presented in switzerland last year, new works on canvas by carsten nicolai and works on paper by albert oehlen have been created for the exhibition at galerie eigen + art. while nicolai has created ten minimal colour fields in which the entire canvas absorbs the grey, oehlen has concentrated on ten watercolours in which the grey appears sometimes as an abstract sign, sometimes as a concrete portrait, and assumes different intensities. when placed side by side, these series form a diptych. in addition to the individual works, they open up a third way of looking at the colour grey. this is further enhanced by the invitation to place oehlen's almost transparent portraits in the imaginary of nicolai's powerful canvases, where the surfaces of colour seem to move into each other, embodying a constant changeability. in analogy to this individual fusion, the exhibition as a whole can only be understood as part of a process that was preceded by a period of collaboration between the two artists. this process is not yet complete with this exhibition.
grau
- albert oehlen and carsten nicolai, 2022
- multimedia installation, dimensions variable
- gesso, acrylic paint on canvas, 30 x 40 cm
- watercolour on paper, 30 x 40 cm
press review:
grey contains all the colours of the world
carsten nicolai and albert oehlen discuss a rather underestimated "intermediate colour" in the mitte gallery eigen + art.
what colour is the world? poets and painters alike ask themselves this question. only the 'in-between colour' grey makes the other colours colourful. logically, it seems like the water that wine tasters drink to calm their taste buds when it is too colourful, and grey has been a favourite colour of painters who want to express the indifferent, the indeterminate, since the early modern period at the latest. in the renaissance, it was grisaille painting, which aimed to create a shadow effect. hercules seghers, a contemporary of rembrandt, conjured up all shades of grey in his — today we would say surreal — landscapes. the early romantic philipp otto runge turned the grey sea from which jesus pulls his disciple peter into an experience of awakening. similar associations arise before the grey paintings of cy twombly and gerhard richter. here, grey has to do with the reflection of these late modern artists on abstraction. it is the self-reflection of painting.
the gallery dialogue between carsten nicolai, born in 1965 in karl-marx-stadt (chemnitz), and albert oehlen, born in 1954 in krefeld, has something to do with all of this and aims to demonstrate a process, an experiment that merges art techniques by working in monochrome, i.e. with lighter or darker tonal values of a single colour — and also with sound (carsten nicolai also became known as alva noto as an experimental musician). this sound is also grey in a monotonous way, as it sounds indifferent, indeterminate and surreal.ten pairs of paintings mark the walls of the eigen + art gallery in diptych form. nicolai has covered the canvases minimalistically with all-absorbing grey, and oehlen has painted almost transparent watercolour formations, biomorphic and amorphous. in this combination, the grey surfaces and the enigmatic shapes seem to move into one another, to merge. everything, according to the imagination, is in a constant state of change.
this blurring becomes just as clear in a joint sound installation by the two artists, who have long since moved away from the pictorial in their visual language. in the gallery hall leading downstairs, you can already hear distorted fragments of words from loudspeakers on the stairs, followed by a science fiction-like echo — and in which a light source rhythmically meets two — grey-coloured — installations. you think you can hear terms from art and society. nothing is grey in grey here. everything is a colourful jumble in your head.
berliner zeitung, ingeborg ruthe, 27.09.2022