11 SEP until 25 OCT 2025
Opening – 11 SEP 2025, 6-9 pm

Gotthard Graubner (1930–2013) addresses the medium colour in his works. Colour is at the core of his pictorial concept and free of representational or thematic integration: “Colour develops as a colour-organism; I observe how it grows, I respect the laws inherent in it”, Graubner once said in 1969.

Starting out with monochrome painting, Graubner developed he himself called Kissenbilder  (cushion paintings) since the mid-1960s, refining them later into Farbraumkörper “colour space bodies”, which transcend the flat, two-dimensional boundaries of the conventional panel. A selection of works on paper reveals a lesser-known but central group of works. As early as 1956/57, during his studies at the Düsseldorf Art Academy, he created large-format nude drawings in charcoal and pencil. Based on the human figure, they mark a dynamization of the form through plastic contour lines and hatched traces of movement. The tension between compression and dissolution foreshadows the later Farbraumkörper. Graubner’s intensive exploration of handmade paper enables him to combine color and light with materiality and texture. At the same time, the materiality of the paper supports his central concern: to lend the two-dimensional image carrier three-dimensional depth and spatial quality.

Gerhard von Graevenitz (1934–1983) belonged to the younger generation of constructive-concrete artists. His work is characterised by concepts such as sequence, progression, structure and chance as formal principles. This is already visible in the series of objects called “White Structures” and “Raster Pictures”, which Graevenitz developed from 1958 on while studying in Munich. Graevenitz arranged half-spherical elevations and deepenings on monochrome white surfaces in such a way that constantly changing patterns appeared due to the incidence of light. In the raster paintings Graevenitz experiments with materiality – on the one hand with the process of burning and on the other hand with the embossing of the impasto surface by using a brick structure, which is distributed over the entire surface of the picture. As one of the co-founders of ‘New Tendencies’ in 1961 he created a kinetic art with an emphasis on processes considering it as a research on perception.

Starting in the mid-1960s Graevenitz reduced his kinetic objects to only a few moving elements mounted on a basic geometric form: On a white square background, black strips move independently of each other so slowly that it is possible for the spectator to capture the overall image that is always being created anew by chance.

The Swiss artist André Thomkins (1930–1985) ranks among the most extraordinary artistic positions of the postwar era. Living in Germany since 1952, he created – blessed with an exuberant inventiveness and the juvenile wish to become an “architect for fantastic buildings” – an oeuvre that in its diversity resists art-historical classification. Inspired by Surrealism, DADA and Pittura Metafisica, he produced quite traditionally paintings, innumerable drawings and watercolours. Essential to his work is experimentation with different artistic means of expression and materials. In addition to collages with sand and wood, he created the so-called Lackskins at the end of the 1950s. Here the artist drips lacquer paint onto a layer of water and influences the distribution of the colours and shapes with a little stick or by blowing until the desired final state is achieved. The image floating on the water is then lifted off onto a paper surface. With this technique, Thomkins combines controlled intervention with a spontaneous, gestural style of painting that recalls the “automatism” of the Surrealists and refers to the “action painting” of the 1960s.  In Rollage, the picture is created by a rubber roller coated with paint and glue, which is unrolled onto a sheet of paper and completed by the artist The pictorial idea of the Rapportmuster are repeating abstract patterns into which the artist fills individual figures and scenes.