Lot Essay
'I inscribe the first form with fluid paint using a broad paintbrush on a light background: positive. (...) I then write into the positive form with a rake spatula: negative. The light/negative form merges into the background and moves this. That which initially seemed positive is now partially negative and vice versa. Some contrasts of this ambivalent pictorial form provoke in the viewer three-dimensional illusions of space, which, however, when followed, lead themselves ad absurdum. With an empty paintbrush, I write for the third time into the still wet surface on the painting and combine the apparently positive with the apparently negative. The contrasts now lose their character of spatial illusion and represent nothing other than a more or less of paint that has been applied, scratched away and pushed away, scratched into the background and staunched.'
(Karl Otto Götz, 'Gemaltes Bild - Kinetisches Bild', 1959, cited in H.J. Schwalm, 'It is a matter of the dissolution of the classical principle of form.' K.O. Götz and the Others. On the Origins of Art Informel, exh.cat., Cologne 2014, p. 35)
(Karl Otto Götz, 'Gemaltes Bild - Kinetisches Bild', 1959, cited in H.J. Schwalm, 'It is a matter of the dissolution of the classical principle of form.' K.O. Götz and the Others. On the Origins of Art Informel, exh.cat., Cologne 2014, p. 35)