Gotthard Graubner
, Erlbach, Germany — , Insel Hombroich, Germany
Volume, space, and colour are at the heart of Gotthard Graubner’s body of work. The artist, who saw his pictorial concept through the notion of Farbraumkörper (‘colour-space body’), produced colour formations of indefinite depth, comparable to the work of Mark Rothko. Not linked to shape, he allows pure colour to appear immaterial. It became the medium of the artwork itself, oozing out a meditative atmosphere. Graubner’s paintings are not exactly monochrome, since there are multiple colours used to create the fogginess of the surface. To enhance the spatial effects, Graubner started mounting synthetic cushions under his canvas in the 1960s, turning the painting into a three-dimensional body. These cushion paintings evoke tranquillity in our vision, and open up a safe path for inner reflection. The viewer steps into a state of meditation and reaches the highest possible achievement of the mind: to think of ‘nothing’. Graubner preferred to not get lost in endless philosophies and theories about his work. Had he been able to express his emotions and intuitions through words, he would have. But he chose to paint.
About Gotthard Graubner
To explain his artistic intentions Graubner once had recourse to a sentence of Leonardo da Vinci’s: “Knowlegde begins with feelings”. Knowledge is used here in a broad sense, sensual, emotional, and intellectual. This however also means that knowledge is not static, does not emerge from confrontational positions, but is realized in the unfolding of half-tones, in listening to the movement of phenomena. In these terms Graubner’s paintings too are transitions and transformations. Through them, colour finds a face which resonds to our gaze.