Lot 36 D

“We experience the realisation of the picture’s form in rhythm. It elevates the artistic activity above interpretation, the idealising and subjective world of impressions. The universal takes shape in it. Oppositions appearing in the rhythms and in the colours lead to tension and movement. They define the dynamic character of the picture,” writes Ernst Wilhelm Nay in his 1955 treatise “Vom Gestaltwert der Farbe – Fläche, Zahl und Rhythmus” (cited from: E.W. Nay. Lesebuch. Selbstzeugnisse und Schriften, Cologne 2002, p. 124).
The artist began creating his Rhythmic Pictures in 1952, after moving from the Taunus mountains to the city of Cologne, and this series is defined by movement and dynamism – the rhythm of the music intensively consumed by the artist, the bustling city and his work on a series of woodcuts provided Nay’s prevailing sources of inspiration in the early 1950s. He directly transposed these into an abstract and seemingly playful visual idiom in which zigzagging lines borrowed from woodcuts are combined with loosely defined areas of colour.
With its weightless, balanced play of colours, the 1953 work “Licht und Dunkel” exemplifies this ground-breaking period of his oeuvre. The lines, which form a consolidating framework in paintings created at the same time, have been reduced down to faint fragments in this work and set the stage for the colour harmonies hovering before the light ground.