Untitled (Gelbes Kreuz) dates from a significant period of transition in Albert Oehlen’s work, documenting a discernible shift away from the more figurative abstractions of his early career, to works of art that confront the aesthetic convention🦹s of appropriated techniques, styles and forms. This work is a seminal painting, introducing the amalgamation of subject, style and composition that becomes essential to Oꦗehlen’s subsequent abstract-figurative works. With its chaotic, random forms which simultaneously vanish and re-surface, it documents the start of the anti-aestheticism that Oehlen coins ‘post-nonrepresentationalism’.

With Untitled (Gelbes Kreuz), Oehlen sets out on his artistic path of juxtaposing abstraction and figuration, deliberately creating a large-scale composition that can neither be called entirely abstract nor figurative. By creating this fusion between figuration and abstra𒉰ction, Oehlen not only explores the limitations of the respective modes of painting, but he also abandons the viewer in the uncertainty⛦ of the painted surface, leaving him to make sense of myriad potential meanings.

With his extensive palette, Oehlen uses the canvas as a platform onto which he layers coats of paints, each in turn overwriting the pre-existing colours and forms, masking and unveiling previous layers of imagery and meaning. In the immediate foreground we are presented with the form of a monolithic yellow cross, reaching the full expanse of the picture plane; behind it, some distorted animalistic imagery appears to vanish with each layer of successive paint. The vie꧋wer is essentially confronted with what appears to be a horse and the antlers of an antelope. These are juxtaposed with the bold form of the cross which, while not quite geometric, indirectly references the Iron Cross and a repressed German history – a subject often touched upon by Oehlen. This ambiguous form, with its Celtic-inspired curves, is partially outlined by a painted mosaic, which highlights Oehlen’s developing technique of allowing motifs to dissolve in insistently reiterated outlines.

Lavishly painted, Untitled (Gelbes Kreuz) is a primary example of how Oehlen’s work detaches itself from the idea of pure painting and reveals itself as a collage on canvas, where each surface becomes a metaphor for meaning. This enables Oehlen to achieve a reciprocal relationship between abstraction and figuration, allowing each to complement the other.  With Untitled (Gelbes Kreuz), Oehlen plays on the methodological idea of semiotics, where the signifier and the signified – in this case the abstracted and the figurative – unite as one and where chaos and randomness appear to be a carefully orℱchestrated pictorial strategy.