Lot 419 D

Bruno Goller was an artistic individualist who cannot be classified according to any standard styles; his works provide us with a glimpse inside an obscure, very private pictorial world. The constantly recurring motifs are never painted from life: they are symbols which draw their meaning from Goller's early biography. Created using a very limited palette and enclosed by thick contour lines, the everyday motifs reduced to their essentials have an almost monumental effect. Werner Schmalenbach has aptly described the transfigured, mystified quality of Goller's work: “Everything emerges from an incessantly active artistic fantasy […] Goller dreams up his pictures before he paints them. They all have something of this dreamed quality about them and this is presumably what - beyond their mere beauty and, incidentally, also a certain austerity and dryness - provides them with that peculiar, very human magic.” (in: Bruno Goller: Bilder Zeichnungen, exhib. cat. Bahnhof Rolandseck, 1991, p. 7).