When my sister and I were teenagers, my grandfather once invited us to Art Cologne, a big German art fair. There, he would point to various artworks, confidently naming their creator from just a glance, then sending us off to check if he was correct. We were quite impressed – he was almost always right. From that day forward, I remember looking at him with a new kind of admiration. Before, I had somewhat thought of his painting as more of an elaborate hobby; from that day, I realized it was a craft he mastered in theory and practice.
In fact, my grandfather was a teacher throughout his life. Just as his encounters with nature shaped his perception, working with students offered him the opportunity to step back and reflect on his craft – an experience I relate to deeply, as I myself use university lecturing to refine and improve my own practice. His students later remembered him as unrelenting in exposing flaws and disproportions, rigorously questioning the visual and, in doing so, opening their eyes – and his own – to new perspectives.
His recurrent immersion in visual basic research and the classroom set important impulses in the evolution of his art. Until the early 1970s, intellectual composition dominated emotional expression in his approach. Across his works, a primacy of formality – a kind of artistic score – still guided his brush.
Formality appeared for instance in geometric shapes that structured his compositions, as seen in a work from 1959/60, the 1968 series of etchings, and a painting from 1969.
Interestingly, he later returned and added a playful twist to this by cutting out fragments from earlier works, mounting them onto a new canvas, and then layering colour on top – see, for instance, his two collages from 1998 and 2002.
Formality was also evident in organic forms still sitting firmly “within” the physical frame, as in the gouaches from 1960 and 1961. In later works, one would note that the action stretched beyond the frame, with centres that felt positioned outside its boundaries.
The artistic rationale for using constructive counter-elements in a gestural painting reflects an idea that is both simple and philosophical: a concept only gains meaning in relation to its opposite.
The counter-element injects a tension between process and structure, chance and control, emotion and calculation, and in that way helps transform seemingly arbitrary gestures into a cohesive image. Much like inflating a balloon, the aim is to build tension without letting the structure collapse. In that sense, getting to visual clarity and quality requires not only to act but also to know intuitively when to stop.