Lot 459 D

''In the year 2000 Helmut Federle produced a group of 26 small format paintings, which with the unusual title Für die Vögel (For the Birds), identified themselves as a new work group. All 26 pictures have a copper or gold-coloured painted ground, onto which Federle applied black or dark brown paint creating varied abstract-geometric areas. Each one of his paintings is assigned a letter of the alphabet, from A to Z. […] The different compositions of the picture series Für die Vögel do not illustrate the respectively allocated letter, and in this free setting of the artistic composition of the individual picture as well as the work group, there manifests itself that which was initially described as a dream of the painter: the independent transformation of the painterly-pictorial language into its own visual value. The letters are only a pretext for a series which, like the birds, disappears. The alphabet of the free flight obeys an autonomous pictorial legality.'' (Friedrich Meschede, Bilderalphabetbilder, in: Helmut Federle, exhib.cat. Musée des Beaux-Arts, Nantes 2002, p.89 and 91).