Press release
Galerie Michael Werner is pleased to present its first solo exhibition of works on paper by the artist Ernst Wilhelm Nay (1902-1968). Thirty-one works made between 1952 and 1968 will be on view, including watercolors, black ink brush and pen drawings on handmade paper, as well as ballpoint pen and felt-tip pen sketches.
In 1951 Ernst Wilhelm Nay relocated from Hofheim at Taunus to the large city Cologne. This change of location is accompanied by an artistic transformation in the artist’s work: in the “Rhythmische Bilder” (“Rhythmic Images”), a period beginning in 1952, he abandoned the representational image composition in favor of an abstract and dynamic style. Small, closely-related colors morph with black line structures, reducing the range of colors to a few chromatic shades. This development of Nay’s painterly work proceeds parallel with his oeuvre of drawings. A vibrant colorfulness and energetic style characterizes the exhibited watercolors made in 1952, in which red and green color fields are bounded and overlapped by, or linked with, black serrated lines. Nay composes his images without any illusion: flat but animated. “I just don’t give priority to color over any other pictorial means but the whole creative work of my art is only determined by the color design.” (Ernst Wilhelm Nay: “Die Gestaltfarbe“ (1952), in: Das Kunstwerk, issue 6, booklet 2, p. 4) This is reflected in his watercolors of the fifties, as well as in the exhibited ballpoint pen and felt-tip pen drawings from the mid-60s, which serve as sketches for his late paintings. These drafts show fields bordered by clear lines to which single colors or color values are assigned. The artist wrote words like “yellow”, “red”, “blue”, “green”, “mezzo”, “dark” and “bright” into the single picture components. The actual color is only aroused in the viewer’s inner eye.
A direct link between the painterly and graphic oeuvre is also established by the gray-shaded watercolors from 1966. These leaves take up the reduced style of his paintings of the 1960s: limited spindle shapes, chains of round or oval discs, strings of pearls and arches spread over the screen vertically and seem to flow beyond the picture’s borders. The imaginative moment apparently manifests itself in the work of Ernst Wilhelm Nay once more.
The colored aquarelles on handmade paper and on cardboard made between 1966 and 1967 strongly contrast with the felt tip pen sketches and fine watercolors. Strong blue winds its way vertically, in arches and waves above the sheet named “R-8-67“ (1967). Radiant yellow, eccentric red and black areas almost claim the entire space of the work “Yellow-Red” (1966). This drawing is part of the “Augenbilder” (“Eye Images”) series, which inevitably evokes associations of lenses and almond-shaped slits by sharp, oval spindles. The viewer looks and is simultaneously being viewed, generating a responsive perceptual experience. The “Augenbilder” are characterized by a unique phenomenon within Nay’s later work which primarily follows a nonrepresentational image design. Describing the guiding principle of his art in 1952, the artist explains “color is not a bearer, is not set for something but rather the appearance by itself.”
Ernst Wilhelm Nay was born in Berlin in 1902 and died in Cologne in 1968. In 1924 he approached Karl Hofer at the Hochschule der Bildenden Künste, Berlin, where he began studying in 1925 and continued his studies as Hofer’s master student in 1927, graduating on year later. Important single exhibitions and retrospective surveys of the artist’s work were presented at Venice Biennale (1956); Museum Folkwang, Essen (1962); documenta III, Kassel (1964); Museum Ludwig at Josef-Haubrich-Kunsthalle, Cologne (1990/1991); Kunsthalle Basel (1991); Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, Edinburgh (1991); Staatliche Graphische Sammlung, Munich (2004); Musée d’Art Moderne et Contemporain, Straßburg (2004/2005); Leopold-Hoesch-Museum, Düren (2011), Kunstmuseum Bonn (2012) and at Michael Werner Gallery, New York (2012).
The exhibition opens at Galerie Michael Werner in Märkisch Wilmersdorf 14 September 2015 and remains on view through 31 October 2015. Gallery hours are Monday through Friday, 10am to 5pm. Booking in advance is recommended by phone +49 (0)33731 32010 or email galeriewerner@michaelwerner.de.