(Erlbach, Vogtland, 1930–2013 Neuss)
Untitled, 1967/68, signed, dated on the reverse Graubner 1967/68, oil on Perlon over foam on canvas, 100 x 80 cm, framed

We are grateful to Kitty Kemr, Estate of Gotthard Graubner, for her kind assistance.

Provenance:
Erik and Lilott Berganus Collection, Hamburg
Private Collection, Florida - acquired at Villa Grisebach, Berlin in 1996 (8.6.1996, sale 51, lot 505)

Colour = Condensation into an organism = Painting
Gotthard Graubner, Malerei, Galerie Karsten Greve, Cologne 1995, p. 10

For Gotthard Graubner, the exposure value of an emphatically, tangibly embodied colour is of the greatest importance, and not the refraction of actual light on material surfaces, which was the first priority for the ZERO artists. From 1962 onwards, in Graubner’s work a progression was made from the propensity to materialise the paint matter, towards pictorial forms in which absorptive materials such as sponges, cushions or cloths play a significant role. Graubner’s artistic desire to give colour its space is manifest not only in the transformation of the pictorial surface into a volumetric image, but it is also very evident in the nature of the colour itself. In order to reach his goal, Graubner developed particular painting procedures and painting materials. The employment of non-industrial colours and special binding agents enabled the artist to create a matte paint application and the subtlety of many coats of paint layered on top of each other. For the rest of his life, Graubner would never abandon this independent existence of paint. He experimented, he dipped sponges in thin, fluid colours and squeezed them out, he painted, he pressed, painted and poured, waited, let pigments seep into thick materials, observed and registered the alteration in the layering of the different thicknesses of paint. A pictorial form arose from the instrumental employment of the sponge; the working tool became the work.
The opaque works from the period around 1968 belong to Graubner’s experimental “Nebelräume” [Fog Spaces].

The onlooker enters an impenetrable, opaque physical condition, which is further emphasised by means of the Perlon fabric stretched over this work; one finds oneself virtually in the work and is enveloped by the materiality of the image, which engages one’s visual sense like a realist painting, without, however, embodying fog or substantiating it. The pictorial fields liberate themselves from the material context; they become aesthetic objects which renounce two-dimensionality in favour of a sculptural quality, forming an analogy to the corporeal experience of the viewer.
Gotthard Graubner, Malerei, Galerie Karsten Greve, Cologne 1995, p. 10 ff.