Gotthard Graubner Rufus 1992/1995 Mixed... Lot 29

Gotthard Graubner Rufus 1992/1995 Mixed media on canvas over synthetic cotton wool 110 x 110 x 12 cm. Signed, dated and titled '"rufus" Graubner 1992/95' verso on canvas and with direction arrow. Provenance Galerie m, Bochum (2010); private collection, South Germany Exhibitions Bochum 2009 (Galerie m), Gotthard Graubner, Chapeau, mon ami (with illustration of view of the exhibition on the gallery homepage) Since the 1960s, Gotthard Graubner has devoted himself with great stringency to the intrinsic qualities and embodiment of colour. In Graubner's work, colour forfeits any mediating function as a tool of representation. Graubner liberates colour from almost any confinement as well as providing it with spatial depth as a comprehensive space for development. Colour becomes its own independent organism upon which the artist takes as little influence as possible. The work “Rufus” impressively illustrates the optical depth that goes hand in hand with the physical depth of Graubner's colour-space bodies. A multitude of colours - which the artist consecutively applies to the underlying workpiece of canvas and filler, allowing each layer to seep in - combine to create a subtle play of nuances. This complexity, combined with the all-encompassing tranquillity that the work radiates, involuntarily causes the viewer to pause; intense observation is accompanied by contemplative immersion in the pure presence of colour. “Thanks to their sensually evident nature, they give themselves up, as it were, to attentive observation, for even if feeling and thinking are indispensable companions of the painting process, if the artist's temperament and mental state influence it, the knowledge of their existence is nevertheless not prerequisite to understand the finished work [...]. The observer is invited, with no prior knowledge, to freely abandon himself to his sensory impressions and to dive into the image as well as into the inexhaustibly differentiated universe of colour.” (Uwe Wieczorek, Gotthard Graubner, Malerei, exhib.cat. Kunstmuseum Liechtenstein 2010, p.27)