Lot 600 D

Sketched composition verso on card mounted on hardboard.

Gerhard Hoehme's contribution to the development of German Informel and beyond is undisputed. The common form of Informel is however far too short an attribution and does not recognise his different reflections on painting, his experimental attitude and his political view. Following his studies, Hoehme first worked at Burg Giebichenstein in Halle, and at the Art Academy in Dusseldorf from 1952. His first works held an exchange with the Parisian avant-garde such as Wols and Fautrier, and he soon developed his own pictorial language which led via Black Pictures to the works that the art historian and philosopher Gottfried Boehm described as "place of material manifestation", and thus emphasised these surfaces that would become characteristic for Hoehme's work: oil colour, paper, newspaper cuttings, polyester twine, polystyrene, plastic tubes and plenty more, which mutate in a pictorial process to pastose, sometimes relief-like surfaces. The so-called damast pictures belong to the first very dense structures on canvas created from 1957 onwards: pastose colours applied in relief, dried into clods, scraped off and collaged, not unlike tree bark. With this approach, Hoehme explores the possibilities of using the innate material of painting plastically in order to transform the level of the traditional picture into an 'object' with a sculptural surface. The colour itself and its dynamic use become the subject of further surprising pictorial discoveries, which Hoehme, as a complexly articulate, energetic and existential artist, allows to be perceived.

MvL