GEORG KARL PFAHLER

With the certificate by the Pfahler Archive, Weissenburg, 12 March 2023. The work will be included in the forthcoming catalogue rainonné of paintings. We thank Florian Pfahler for his kind assistance.

Provenance: Directly purchased from the artist by the present owner in 1965, since then private collection Germany.

"For me, the concentration on colour expresses a particular feeling for life. To this extent colour, like art itself, is an inner necessity, meaning that I grant colour a value which the object otherwise takes away from it, especially when it is committed to the depiction." Georg Karl Pfahler

The present work, which belongs to the series "Spirit of Reality" and was created in 1964/65, features Pfahler's characteristic block-like forms and sharply defined areas of colour. Eye-catching and dominant, he applies the distinctive blue colour in various shades and complements it with the colours orange, red, green, brown and white. The rounded shapes, which soften the relationship between the hard edges and the strong colours, may be interpreted as a visual representation of the consequences of world-changing events. Through the well-conceived colour concept, which thrives on the counterplay and interplay of colours, the painter gives "SP.O.R Recond" its own colour spatiality and endows the painting with an illusion of what looks like deep space. "The surface is blown up, the colour floods into the space," as Pfahler says in explaining his art.

Born in Emetzheim in 1926, the internationally acclaimed artist Georg Karl Pfahler, known for his vivid and colourful works, is one of the key interpreters and pioneers of the Hard Edge art movement in Germany, along with Günther Fruhtrunk. The experience he gained under his teacher Willi Baumeister at the Art Academy in Stuttgart strongly influenced Pfahler and developed his sense of the unity of colour and space and the simplification of forms. Initially active as a sculptor, he later devoted himself to painting. His works from the early 1950s, which adopted the Informel style, were soon followed by "formative" works in which the painterly structures were condensed into sharply contoured coloured blocks and surfaces. This increasing reduction of his pictorial language towards geometric abstract forms and block-like areas of colour, found its most concise expression in the 1960s. His pictures became increasingly clear in their structure and design and the colour surfaces more sharply delineated. Many positive experiences in New York, encounters with important representatives of colour field painting and friendships with leading Hard Edge artists, including Leon Polk Smith and Barnett Newman, who hung his first exhibition in the United States at the Fischbach Gallery in New York in 1966, had a lasting influence on Pfahler's œuvre.