Shades of Grey | Skarstedt
I saw this group show with perfect timing: on a day in which it felt like the weather was turning, from summer to autumn. I’d awoken that day to crepscular gloom - a grey room, with a grey day ahead. The colour grey is what links the works on show here, a starry collection from KAWS to Gerhard Richter, as reflects the financial heft of the international gallery that hosts it.
The work from the exhibition I’m thinking of today was executed in 1999 by the German painter and provocateur Albert Oehlen, whose more recent work I featured on here a few years ago. It’s a large painting with a typical nonsensically tongue-in-cheek title: Titankatze Mit Versuchstier (Titanium Cat with Laboratory Tested Animal). Two faces, and the suggestions of two bodies, loom out at us through the grey gloom. Their expressions are cartoonishly grumpy, as far as I can make out (which isn’t very far). Their whirling eyes lock us in place. Or maybe we lock on to their eyes, considering so much of what surrounds them is missing or unclear.
Titankatze Mit Versuchstier (Titanium Cat with Laboratory Tested Animal) (1999)
Oehlen’s a painter who deliberately leans in to the ugly and messy in order to confront the viewer with their own limited perception. Restricting the palette to grey aids him in this artistic mission - he’s quoted in the show notes as saying that he wished to “artificially heighten the lust for colour”. We look at the painting, its grey tones in thick bands of paint, and want more.
On an opposite wall is a smaller, plainer work by Gerhard Richter, one of Oehlen’s key influences. It’s from 1970, and untitled. It merely pictures swirling smoke. A depopulated version of what we saw before, with Oehlen. An even more withholding scene of grey gloom. There’s a shared monochromatic nihilism between those two works, that reached me all the more directly on the dull day I saw them. It was still summer, but I shivered.
Shades of Grey is at Skarstedt (London). 17 July - 28 September 2024