Ernst Wilhelm Nay Lot n° 10

Ernst Wilhelm Nay In block forms 1953 Oil on canvas, painted on both sides. One composition rotated 180° 100 x 110 cm Framed. Each signed and dated 'Nay 53'. - Recto at lower margin with small retouch. Margins doubled to be able to present the work on both sides. Scheibler 694 Provenance Dr. Wickert, Berlin; private collection, Berlin; Lempertz Cologne, auction Contemporary Art 1042, 29.11. 2014, lot 514; private collection North Rhine-Westphalia. The 1953 double-sided painting "In Block Forms" reveals a departure by Ernst Wilhelm Nay from any representational forms. This development towards pure abstraction coincides with the artist's move from the rural Taunus to Cologne in 1951. Elisabeth Nay-Scheibler characterizes the works created in 1952/1953 in the lively metropolitan atmosphere as "Rhythmic Pictures", which are marked by the artist's affinity for new music. Nay frequently attended concerts by composers such as Arnold Schönberg, Béla Bartok, and Paul Hindemith, as well as avant-garde composers such as Pierre Boulez and Luigi Nono, and exchanged ideas with them about musical and painterly parallels. The abstract compositions of this time mostly show a light and dynamic seeming round of loosely set, open colour forms and line structures. These characteristics can also be found on the reverse side of "In Block Forms" - a composition which, according to information from Aurel Scheibler, the artist had painted over and which was only uncovered posthumously after 1990. It is dominated by large-scale color forms in brown and orange tones, enlivened by jagged black lines and contrasting blue and blue-grey color forms, thus combining to form a powerfully dynamic overall composition. The front composition, on the other hand, exhibits a calmer character characterized by softly rounded forms. The complete absence of line structures here already provides a glimpse of the disc pictures that Nay will be working on from 1955 onwards. White, light blue and dark blue ellipses float together with rounded small rectangular forms in front of a harmonious harmony of various colour compartments in black, dark red, dark blue and ochre. The remaining white parts do not appear as independent forms, but as a background surface that shines out brightly in places, underlining the impression of floating lightness. Nay himself wrote about this phase of his work: "In 1952, after the strict constriction, there was a strong dissolution of the pictorial forms. But for my art a formal objectivity is always a direct demand, more and more rhythm came to the fore - rhythm of the surface. The theme of the surface space, which had actually always remained constant, was thought of in terms of ellipsoidal illusory processes. To create complete and unambiguous clarity for the picture here occupied me for years, and I observed the transformations particularly attentively from this point of view." (cit. after: Retrospective E.W. Nay, Ausst.Kat. Cologne/Basel/Edinburgh 1991, p.34).