In the 1950s and early 1960s, the Informel style captivated art audiences, challenging not only classic realism but also the formal constraints of geometric abstraction styles.
However, although widely recognized for its historical significance as the „last international style“, and despite – or perhaps rather because of – its immense popularity and rapid adoption, the movement’s prominence already faded from the late 1960s. Known artists quietly abandoned or even explicitly rejected Informel, many swiftly reorienting their artistic trajectories as the movement collapsed.
But my grandfather doubled down. To understand why, Dieter Ronte, the long-time director of the Bonn Museum of Art, provides a clue in an essay where he describes Schlieker’s art as a form of “visual basic research”. By that he meant that the artist’s goal was not to “dismiss” the object but to observe and then distill its essential qualities or aspects.
Indeed, my grandfather often cited impressionists like Corinth and Kokoschka as formative influences, viewing the Informel simply as a contemporary vehicle for capturing the intensity of human experience.
Grounding the genesis of his work in his intent to see, un-see, and re-see the world liberates it from being merely a product of its time. For artists who interpreted the Informel not just as freedom from oppression, but as the freedom to engage with the world anew, it became a gateway to true innovation. Schlieker was one of them.
"Procida", 1978
The visual basic researcher in Schlieker weathered the crisis of the Informel by re-immersing himself in the real world and nature in particular – recalibrating his approach, re-confronting his subject, and re-discovering its essence.
The works on paper “Garmisch 77” (below) and “Procida” (above) embody this period, about which my grandfather himself would later recount the “inner necessity to renew my way of painting, to escape the risk of routine”.
While his previously cited 1959 work might best be described as „abstract interpretation of a winter landscape“, “Garmisch 77” approaches the subject from the other side, resulting in what might be circumscribed as „winter landscape-infused abstraction“.
The significance of immersing oneself in the environment cannot be overstated. As a young boy, my interests did not lend themselves to deep conversations about art. Still, I vividly recall my grandfather insisting that one cannot master “Informalism” without first mastering “Realism” in all its facets.
It is well possible that this life lesson was first delivered with a mischievous smile as we compared our own childhood doodles to his masterful canvases (he would sometimes take those doodles and pin them to the studio stairs; his interest in how we perceived the world was always genuine).
At the time, I viewed his stance as a comment on the craft of painting, like: “You first need to earn the right to play with colour the way I do”. Today, I wonder if his words were less about the “doing” and more about the “seeing”. But of course, knowing what you’re doing – mastering the craft – is a big piece of the puzzle, too. And that brings me to the final point.