Lot 28 D

Gotthard Graubner has been developing and perfecting his genre of Farbraumkörper since 1977. In repeated work processes, he saturated the untreated carriers of canvas, fibrefill and textile covers with paint that seeped into the cushion-like substance. Paint and carrier form a unit. Highly individual colour imprints thus develop virtually autonomously in multiple nuances – what appears monochrome at first, reveals an abundance of shades of colour upon closer inspection.
Caroline Sommer writes the following on the background of the creation of his works, ‘For him, his images are not abstract in the sense of being non-objective. Each image is rather the projection of a real experience into the medium of painting’, explains Graubner. ‘This can be, for example, nature in its thousandfold processes or a feeling that the painter expresses by means of colour. […] The artist relies on experience rather than on the understanding of a process. In constant reflection of this, his painting is created.’ (Gotthard Graubner, Farblicht, exhib.cat. Kestner-Gesellschaft Hanover 2003, p.29).
The early colour-space object on offer here shimmers in fine shades of grey. Toward the edges, floating, seemingly disembodied sections merge into areas where the heavy, colour-saturated materiality of the object becomes visible.
The work originates from the collection of Galerie Defet, which acted as a major promoter of contemporary art in Nuremberg for many decades.