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Lot Essay
'My paintings expand as the illumination increases and when it is extinguished, so are they. Beginning and end are interchangeable.’
(Gotthard Graubner quoted in K. Ruhrberg, K. Honnef e.a (eds.), Art of the 20th Century, Part 1, Cologne 2000, p. 302)
“Graubner’s paintings reveal a quality of colour which is extraordinarily diffcult to describe in words and diffcult to reproduce photographically – a quality which would be only insuffciently designated by the notion of monochromy. This term is generally understood as referring to the abandoning of a variety of colours in favour of one colour only – that is, the complete abandoning of contrasts between both colours and forms; nevertheless, the phenomenon can produce highly varied results. In Graubner’s paintings however, the colourfulness is not reduced to one clear, identifable colour. Rather, each individual painting describes a feld of colour belonging to a particular colour quality, a feld which is not uniform, but contains a subtle multiplicity of colours. The colour appears as an assembly through the application of many thin layers on cushion-like, padded supports, which therefore have a spatial as well as
a planar effectiveness. In this way, practically every step in this course of this assembly is preserved and thus remains partially recognizable in the succeeding one. The result richly determined and incorporating many tones, is a colour quality made up of countless components, which – in consequence of the particular manner in which colour is applied – form structures which are cloudy, in motion, not consolidated in a formal sense.”
(M. Bleyl: Gotthard Graubner Farbraumkorper der XL. Biennale, Venice 1982, p. 8)
(Gotthard Graubner quoted in K. Ruhrberg, K. Honnef e.a (eds.), Art of the 20th Century, Part 1, Cologne 2000, p. 302)
“Graubner’s paintings reveal a quality of colour which is extraordinarily diffcult to describe in words and diffcult to reproduce photographically – a quality which would be only insuffciently designated by the notion of monochromy. This term is generally understood as referring to the abandoning of a variety of colours in favour of one colour only – that is, the complete abandoning of contrasts between both colours and forms; nevertheless, the phenomenon can produce highly varied results. In Graubner’s paintings however, the colourfulness is not reduced to one clear, identifable colour. Rather, each individual painting describes a feld of colour belonging to a particular colour quality, a feld which is not uniform, but contains a subtle multiplicity of colours. The colour appears as an assembly through the application of many thin layers on cushion-like, padded supports, which therefore have a spatial as well as
a planar effectiveness. In this way, practically every step in this course of this assembly is preserved and thus remains partially recognizable in the succeeding one. The result richly determined and incorporating many tones, is a colour quality made up of countless components, which – in consequence of the particular manner in which colour is applied – form structures which are cloudy, in motion, not consolidated in a formal sense.”
(M. Bleyl: Gotthard Graubner Farbraumkorper der XL. Biennale, Venice 1982, p. 8)