Lot 25 D

Ernst Wilhelm Nay - Figurale in Hellblau

Auction 1256 - overview Cologne
29.11.2024, 18:00 - Modern and Contemporary Art - Evening Sale
Estimate: 250.000 €
Result: 315.000 € (incl. premium)

Ernst Wilhelm Nay

Figurale in Hellblau
1950

Oil on canvas. 80.2 x 100.4 cm. Framed. Signed and dated 'Nay. 50.' lower right in black. Signed, titled and dated 'NAY - FIGURALE IN HELLBLAU 1950' at the top on the stretcher in black. - In very fine, colour-fresh condition, with inconspicuous margin abrasion to the left.

Ernst Wilhelm Nay’s large-format painting “Figurale in Hellblau” is one of the “Fugale Bilder”: the works of this brief but important phase in the artist’s oeuvre were created from 1949 to 1951. For Nay this was an important period in which he artistically clarified and organised his concept of painting.
Nay’s stylistic reorientation is consistently linked with his work on a series of lithographs. This unfamiliar printing technique required the artist to break up his visual vocabulary into individual components and, in doing so, to reveal his plans for colour and form. This then led to the insight that he would compose his art entirely on the basis of colour from this point forward: “For me, colour is a formal value”, Nay writes in 1952, “I do not just grant colour primacy over the other elements of art, the entire artistic activity is defined solely on the basis of the chromatic formation” (cited in: E. W. Nay. Retrospektive, exh. cat. Hamburg/Wiesbaden/Duisburg 2022/23, p. 151). As the painting “Figurale in Hellblau” shows, the new works are characterised by their clear structuring of the picture plane in zigzag, curvilinear or leaf-shaped forms accompanied by black contours or dots. Their apparent layering in depth and the use of diagonal lines provide the painting with dynamism and rhythm. Nay borrowed the new-found arrangement of his pictures from the musical stylistic device of the fugue, that is, the compositional principle of a polyphony incorporating multiple voices. In analogy to music, Nay attempted to arrange the colours in his pictures based on timbre and colour “chords” in order to develop visual dynamism.

Catalogue Raisonné

Scheibler 525

Provenance

Hanna Bekker vom Rath, Hofheim/Taunus; Galerie Orangerie-Reinz, Cologne; Kunsthaus Lempertz, Cologne, Auction 744, 6 June 1997, lot 350; private collection, North Rhine-Westphalia

Exhibitions

Munich 1950 (Haus der Kunst), Neue Rheinische Sezession Düsseldorf, cat. no. 148; Cologne 1984 (Galerie Orangerie-Reinz), 25 Jahre Galerie Orangerie-Reinz 1959-1984, p. 53, with col. ill.