“Lichter Raum” (“Light room”)

Details

Provenance: Galerie Walter Storms, Munich;private ownership, Southern Germany.

Description

• Dynamic work with strong contrasts painted during the artist’s most important creative phase between 1980 and 1999
• Raimund Girke was a pioneer of analytical painting after 1945
• Comprehensive retrospectives of his work took place during his lifetime, but the most recent posthumous exhibition was in 2022 at the MKM Museum Küppersmühle in Duisburg. In Raimund Girke’s main creative phase between 1980 and 1999, he began structuring the surfaces of his works with dynamic brushstrokes – at times strong vertical strokes, at times rythmic ones. He specifically used the intensifying, activating effect of dark tones to make the colour white stand out more. The dark strokes either shine through a thin layer of white, merge with it wet on wet, or contrast with it as accents. For him, white stands above all other colours and embodies absolute silence, energy and clarity in his work. The work of the German representative of abstract analytical painting has been awarded numerous prizes and exhibitions at home and abroad. In 1959 he received the “City of Wolfsburg Prize” for painting, in 1995 he was awarded the “Lovis Corinth Prize” and in 2002 he received the “Art Prize of Lower Saxony”. He took part in documenta 6 in Kassel in 1977. A comprehensive retrospective of his work took place in 1995/96 at the Sprengel Museum Hanover, the Von der Heydt Museum Wuppertal, the Saarlandmuseum Saarbrücken and the Kunsthalle Nuremberg.