Peter Brüning

From 1960, inspired by his friend Cy Twombly, Brüning moved away from his early style and its dark colours and dense compositions and, instead, adopted a spacious, light and gestural style. In 1964, he abandoned abstraction in favour of a reduced clarity of form, creating his first “traffic landscape” in which he combined cartographic icons such as contour lines, arterial roads and pictograms within intensely colourful and playful compositions. From 1966, he created sculptures from painted iron that, later, often included landscape photographs and electronic traffic signs. At the same time, Brüning also produced large number of drawings and prints. He participated in Documenta in 1959, 1964 and 1968 and received the Villa Romana Award in 1961. In 1969, he was given a professorship at the Düsseldorf Academy of Art. A major retrospective was dedicated to him by the Küppersmühle Museum of Modern Art in Duisburg in 2007.