The source for all the Albert Oehlen works that fill the Serpentine is a painting by John Graham, the American artist.
Graham was a mentor for Abstract Expressionists such as Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning. His own work is defiantly yet quirkily figurative, and Tramonto Spaventoso (1940-49) is among his strangest: a moustachioed head with pilot’s hat and goggles, a mermaid, a giant letter H, sun-like forms with faces and legs, and text.
Oehlen, one of the punkish Neue Wilde painters who emerged in Germany in the Eighties, returned to Graham’s painting often over 20 years in the John Graham Remix series. The problem is that, as with so many remixes, most of the work proves mildly diverting at best. One longs to return to the original. However much Oehlen pulls Graham’s painting apart, injects it with high colour, amplifies or obliterates its iconography in splats and sprays, he never matches its transfixing weirdness.
Oehlen always feels like he’s treading water. There’s the pretension of anarchy, yet the works are inert. Marks that should suggest energy feel mannered. The compelling fragments in Graham are translated into incoherent messes. I think Oehlen courts that incoherence, but it’s not a productive disorder.
The show’s nadir is its centrepiece. Oehlen’s latest riffs on Graham also riff on the Rothko Chapel and Mark Rothko’s gloomy masterpieces set in the building in Houston, Texas. Oehlen wanted to explore whether the meditative quality of the Rothkos could be achieved not through spareness and silence but through violence.
But these paintings and charcoal drawings, the same scale as the Rothkos and accompanied by bursts of hardcore music by Steamboat Switzerland, could not be more limp.
Until February 2 (020 7402 6075, serpentinegalleries.org)
