Sale: 541 / Contemporary Art Day Sale, June 09. 2023 in Munich Lot 159

 

159
Gotthard Graubner
Ohne Titel (Trampolin), 1970.
Mixed media. Oil on nylon, on synthetic fiber &uum
Estimate:
€ 60,000 / $ 64,800
Sold:
€ 68,580 / $ 74,066

(incl. surcharge)
Ohne Titel (Trampolin). 1970.
Mixed media. Oil on nylon, on synthetic fiber über Synthetikwatte , on canvas.
Signed and dated on the reverse. With a label on the stretcher, there titled and inscribd in typography. 130 x 130 x 12 cm (51.1 x 51.1 x 4.7 in). [JS].

• Graubner's "Kissenbilder" (Cushion Pictures) reject any sort of brushstroke and push the boundaries of the classic panel picture.
• Graubner has been pursuing his quest for a maximum liberation of the color since the 1960s.
• Graubner's progressive creations possess unique characteristics.
• In 1977 acquired from Art in Progess, Munich, the gallery of the art dealer and later collector Ingvild Goetz.
• Part of a German private collection for more than 40 years
.

PROVENANCE: Galerie Art in Progress, Munich (with the label on the stretcher).
Private collection Baden-Württemberg (acquired from the above in 1977).

Julia Mattern, Wandlungen/Transformations, in: Gotthard Graubner. Mit den Bildern atmen / Breathing with the Paintings, Cologne 2018, p. 22.

Initially in watercolors, then also on canvas, Graubner tried out forms of paint application that gave priority to the often thickened layers of paint over the limiting form of the image carrier. On his path to intensify the spatial effect of the colored areas in the 1960s, Graubner resorted to installing colored cushions in the picture itself and later covered it with Perlon fabric. By previously soaking and painting the fabric cushions with several layers of diluted acrylic paints, Graubner creates a fluctuating concentration like a gently breathing body of color. These so-called "cushion pictures" were first exhibited by the important Düsseldorf Galerie Alfred Schmela, who was also one of the first to show the art of the ZERO group and the first solo exhibition of Gerhard Richter's black-and-white photo paintings in 1964. In in this context he was immortalized by Richter in two portraits. Graubner's unique "cushion pictures" quickly became his unique selling point and earned the young artist a teaching position at the Academy of Fine Arts in Hamburg as early as in 1965, where he finally held a professorship for painting as of 1969. Graubner is therefore a progressive eccentric and at the same time a child of his era, considering that Frank Stella also strove to break the boundaries of classic panel painting with his "shaped canvases"in the 1960s and to attain - like Graubner - the greatest possible congruence between form and content. In 1968, Graubner showed his early "cushion pictures" at the documenta in Kassel. And in 1976, the progressive German art collector and curator Ingvild Goetz showed them for the first time at her Munich gallery ‘Art in Progress’. The present early work "Untitled (Trampoline)", in which Graubner sets the dense grey-green into a gently modulated vibration, was acquired by the gallery ‘Art in Progess' in the course of this exhibition and has since been in a German private collection. [JS]



159
Gotthard Graubner
Ohne Titel (Trampolin), 1970.
Mixed media. Oil on nylon, on synthetic fiber &uum
Estimate:
€ 60,000 / $ 64,800
Sold:
€ 68,580 / $ 74,066

(incl. surcharge)