Lot 608 D

With his work, Richard Paul Lohse stylistically picks up the thread of Russian Constructivism and the Dutch De Stijl movement. During the 1940s, the artist develops a method for the standardisation of picture elements and pictorial means, similar to Theo van Doesburg. His individual structural elements are differentiated by colours which, in the case of Lohse, are not burdened with associations. The dynamics of his paintings do not develop intuitively but rather systematically by means of a network of coordinates and colour sequences. In this way, works are created in a 'modular' or a 'serial' order from rectangles or squares that are orientated to the outer picture margin. While the 'modular' order discloses itself out of a core in horizontal, vertical or rotating movements, the basis of the 'serial' order lies in a continuous sequence of colours. His picture titles clearly disclose the method of his approach and often name the basic principal of the painting's framework. This is also the case in the work '2 Bewegungen um eine Achse' with its theme of a rotating picture centre. The systematic structures produce movements of direction that Lohse further developed in the 1940s and 1950s over a long period of time. With this work also, Lohse consistently pursues his approach: 'Colour and form neutralise one another as opposites. […] The freedom of aesthetics, the equilibrium, transforms in predetermination, the terse aspect of the statically tectonic into a state of kinetic flexibility.' (Richard Paul Lohse, Modulare und Serielle Ordnungen, exhib.cat. Städtische Kunsthalle Düsseldorf 1975, p.22).