On display are works from the 1990s, paintings on canvas and paper. The colour white is the primary subject of these works. Gestural, yet following a certain order, rough and free brushstrokes span the canvas, pointing the way. It is the white that comes to the fore, and it remains dominant, even in the interaction with the blue and brown tones.
After an early turn towards Art Informel, in the 1950s he found his focus in the colour white, the ‘queen of colours’, as he wrote once, the ‘colour that is closest to the light.’ (1) At first his paintings were characterised by abstraction rich in structure, while later they were compositions in strict, concentrated geometry with nuanced colour tones that moved within the narrow spectrum of white-grey.
In retrospect, the works from that period prove to be the prelude to what was to come. With the turn towards gesture that began in the 1980s, that conceived of the canvas as a limited but expansive field of work, Raimund Girke introduced an expressive element into his work that was capable of creating an inner drama. For here, Girke opens up a play of forces that interact with each other and create a reciprocal tension. The energetic field of the painting’s background and the energy discharged by the brushstrokes evoke the experience of dynamism and movement, both diagonally and vertically.(2)
Through Girke’s painting, white appears to us as the colour that contains all other colours and, at the same time, does not contain them; as the colour that, in contrasting coexistence with other colours, is capable of elevating its own energy and radiance to a material as well as immaterial subject. Also, Girke’s play with black, grey, blue and brown of varying intensity and presence on the canvas reveals his artistic intention of analytically elaborating the rhythmic and processual in his painting.
With the versatile realisation of this methodology, Girke sets accents (German: ‘Akzente’) in each of his pictures. The high-contrast emphasis of the lively, painterly gesture is more than a trace that remains visible. Rather, it emphasises the process of perception in a dynamic way, making the viewer’s eye its essence and thus determining the pictorial character of each work.
Raimund Girke’s artistic development is not linear; he has evolved ideas, abandoned them or developed them further. His focussed and consistent way of working has made him an influential pioneer of analytical painting. In his search for order, structure and dynamism in painting, Girke found ways to reduce his pictorial language continuously and at the same time expand the intellectual space. These ways unfold in the gestural power, in the energy of the paintings at the height of his creativity.
Raimund Girke was born in Heinzendorf, Lower Silesia, then Germany, in 1930; he passed away in Cologne in 2002. His first institutional solo exhibition took place at the Kestner-Gesellschaft Hannover, Germany, (1969), followed by further important exhibitions, including at Kunstmuseum Düsseldorf, Germany, (1983), Sprengel-Museum Hannover (1995–96), Von der Heydt-Museum in Wuppertal, Germany, and at the Galerie Neuer Meister der Staatlichen Kunstsammlungen Dresden, Germany (1996), at Ming Yuan Art Centre, Shanghai, China, (2005), at Museum Kurhaus Kleve, Germany, (2012), and at Museum Küppersmühle für Moderne Kunst in Duisburg, Germany (2022). In 1977, he participated in Documenta 6 in Kassel, Germany. Works by Raimund Girke are part of important collections worldwide.
(1) ‘[D]ie hellste farbe, die strahlendste und intensivste farbe ist das weiss. weiss ist die königin der farben; denn die farben sind ,taten des lichts‘ (goethe) und weiss ist die farbe, die dem licht am nächsten ist. schwarz und grau steigern das weiss, sie tragen es und spielen nur eine untergeordnete, dienende rolle.’ Raimund Girke in: Das einfache, das schwer zu machen ist (Hannover: Galerie Adam Seide, 1960), n.p.
(2) Cf. Gottfried Boehm, ‘Force and Counterforce’ [‘Kraft und Gegenkraft’, 2000], in: Madeleine Girke, ed., Raimund Girke: Between White (Berlin, Wijnegem: Estate Raimund Girke, Axel Vervoordt Galerie and KEWENIG, 2022), pp. 359–367.
