Ewald Mataré - Drei Kühe am Meer (Drei Kühe in den Dünen) - image-1

Lot 448 D

Ewald Mataré - Drei Kühe am Meer (Drei Kühe in den Dünen)

Auction 1099 - overview Cologne
01.12.2017, 18:00 - Modern Art
Estimate: 20.000 € - 25.000 €
Result: 18.600 € (incl. premium)

Ewald Mataré

Drei Kühe am Meer (Drei Kühe in den Dünen)
Circa 1946

Watercolour and opaque white on watercolour laid paper 34.2/35 x 50 cm Framed under glass. Inscribed, titled, and dated '33 Drei Kühe am Meer um 1946' in pencil verso. - The upper sheet margin slightly unevenly cut. - A faint, vertical fold in the centre.

In the 1940s, Mataré devised small, strongly abstracted, sculptural “cow symbols”, skillfully made up of triangular panes. These formal dabbles culminated in the versions of the “Mathematik-Kuh” created in 1946. Mataré seems to have employed a related creative principle in his watercolours too, in as far as the geometricizing triangular shapes have been consistently rendered in the two-dimensional medium. The theme itself is entirely made up of them, be it the waves, the allusion of a lighter-coloured surf, the recumbent animal figures, and the dunes. The cows are depicted as a rigorously composed darker drawing that strikes a sharper contrast, formally condensing the animals into the shape of parallelograms and melding them in a rhythmic overall shape. Mataré executed the landscape differently, namely by repeating shapes and opting for abstract-geometric sequences. The resulting piece presents itself as a cohesive, accomplished visual concept that has an almost graphic effect. In all of this, Mataré managed to reconcile formal rigor with poetic sentiment by making use of the softness and subtle indeterminateness of the watercolor technique, which he employed in order to translate his impression of lived reality (presumably on the island of Spiekeroog) into a delicate, almost monochrome sequence of colours.

Catalogue Raisonné

Vlasic 1946.8; Köcke 180

Provenance

Galerie Alex Vömel, Düsseldorf; Collection Olbricht, Essen (frame label verso)

Exhibitions

Düsseldorf 1975 (Galerie Alex Vömel); Düsseldorf 2005 (Akademie-Galerie/Kunstakademie), Ewald Mataré. Eine Werkübersicht, cat. no. 158, ("Drei Kühe in den Dünen") with colour illus.