Ernst Wilhelm Nay - Mit weißer Spindel - image-1
Ernst Wilhelm Nay - Mit weißer Spindel - image-2
Ernst Wilhelm Nay - Mit weißer Spindel - image-1Ernst Wilhelm Nay - Mit weißer Spindel - image-2

Lot 37 D

Ernst Wilhelm Nay - Mit weißer Spindel

Auction 1223 - overview Cologne
06.06.2023, 18:00 - Evening Sale - Modern and Contemporary Art
Estimate: 400.000 € - 500.000 €
Result: 504.000 € (incl. premium)

Ernst Wilhelm Nay

Mit weißer Spindel
1967

Oil on canvas. 160 x 150 cm. Framed. Signed, dated and titled 'NAY - 'Mit weißer Spindel' 1967' and with an arrow to show hanging direction verso on the stretcher. - In fine condition with fresh colours. With minor craquelure.

Ernst Wilhelm Nay’s development as a painter culminated in his reductive, deliberately two-dimensionally conceived works from the second half of the 1960s. With undiminished – actually, rekindled – creative power and artistic energy, Nay once again found an entirely new form of expression in these final years.
The magnificent, expansive painting “Mit weißer Spindel”, which he created the year before his death, superbly illustrates the characteristic features of this phase of his work. The two-dimensionality which Nay was then using to concentrate on the pure communicative power of colour and forms reached its climax at that time. A suggestively anthropomorphic vocabulary of forms has filled the entire picture plane with its nonhierarchical, planar quality. The mostly vertical orientation evokes the impression that we are looking at a detail from a larger, flowing whole. The late works’ restriction of the palette to just a few tones is pushed to its extreme in the present painting; only the primary colours of red, yellow and blue flow – cool and radiant – in curves extending out gently around the white spindle-shaped form of the title.
“It is worth a life to push so far ahead that the real colour image can emerge and, in doing so, the colour resonates in such a way that, without any particular intention on the part of the artist, something human becomes visible, human and animal in a new, unknown formulation,” wrote Nay in October 1967 (cited from: E.W. Nay. Lesebuch. Selbstzeugnisse und Schriften, Cologne 2002, p. 297).

Catalogue Raisonné

Scheibler 1244

Provenance

Private ownership; Galerie Thomas, Munich (gallery label on the stretcher); Private collection North Rhine-Westphalia