Bruno Goller Lot n° 2

Bruno Goller The closet 1947 Oil on canvas. 85.5 x 65.5 cm. Framed. Signed in brown lower right 'Bruno Goller'. - In good condition. Provenance Acquired directly from the artist; private collection Rhineland Exhibitions Hannover 1958 (Kestner-Gesellschaft), Bruno Goller, cat. No. 17 (on the stretcher with the label); Wuppertal 1964 (Kunst- und Museumsverein), Bruno Goller. Paintings, cat. No. 9; Sao Paulo 1965 (VIII Bienal de Sao Paulo, Exposição Alemã), Bruno Goller, cat. No. 1 with ill. p. 15 (on stretcher with label); Düsseldorf 1969 (Städtische Kunsthalle). Bruno Goller, cat. No. 12 (on stretcher with label); Düsseldorf 1986 (Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen), Bruno Goller. Works from Six Decades, cat. No. 11 with color illustration p. 31 (on the stretcher with the label). Literature Anna Klapheck, Bruno Goller (Monographs on Contemporary Rhenish-Westphalian Art Vol. 10), Recklinghausen 1958, with ill. p. 38; Volker Kahmen, Bruno Goller, Düsseldorf 1981, p. 43, No. 27 with ill. p. 120. Bruno Goller stood apart from the art trends of his time with his quiet pictorial worlds taken from everyday contexts and abstracted into timeless ciphers. World War II marked a caesura for him. In the post-war years he continued his earlier motifs, but found a warmer color mood with a predominantly brown-toned color scheme. A cubist broken up formal language together with inspirations from medieval book illumination now led to an increased use of ornamental elements. In the mid-1950s, Werner Schmalenbach became aware of the artist. The retrospective he organized in 1958 at the Kestner-Gesellschaft in Hanover was Goller's first major solo exhibition and made him known to a wider public. "The Wardrobe," which offers a picture-filled glimpse into his inner life, is one of the best-known and most frequently exhibited paintings of the postwar years; it was also shown in the retrospective. Volker Kahmen wrote about it: "Less medieval, only the garment folds show such echoes, and yet seized by that ornamentalization, is the picture 'The Wardrobe', 1947; integrated into the representational reference of the closet slats, the decorative ribbons there, increased to an almost physiognomic expression, make themselves more and more independent." (Kahmen, op. cit., p. 43). In addition to these vividly executed furniture details, it is the fabric draperies of the garments, dominated by diagonals, that lend the still life an unusual dynamism.