Axel Vervoordt Gallery is proud to present its first solo show of
German painter Raimund Girke (1930-2002) in Hong Kong. The
works on show are monochromes, highlighting the second half of
the Girke’s career, and focus on silence and serenity, thus obtaining
a distinct meditative character.
At the age of 27, Raimund Girke decided that the colour white was
to play a central role in his art. He felt that other colours would
obstruct one’s feelings towards the calmness of the continuous
changes in nature. He described his painting as a clear reaction to
the visual stimulus satiation and as an attempt to take the observer
to a new level of concentration. As he stated in 1965 in one of his
writings: “White demands meditation.” During the decades that
followed, he remained within the basic paradigm of controlled
geometric abstraction, but instead of musing on non-visible, spiritual
or conceptual phenomena, he explored fundamental physical
phenomena such as light, motion, rhythm and vibration. In an
exhibition text written in 1960, he elaborated on his focus:
Polychromy prevents colour from making an impact, given the
constant competition, whereas the restriction of the colour scale
enables one colour to manifest its full intensity. The brightest colour,
the most luminous and intense colour, is white. White is the Queen
of Colours; for colours are the “actions of the light” (Goethe) and
white is the colour most akin to the light. Black and grey intensify
white, supporting it, while playing only a subordinate role
themselves. They modulate white in its infinitesimal nuances,
causing it to vibrate and imbuing the colour over the whole picture
surface with continuous movement, and thus with life.
It is of little surprise then that the best art for him was the “absolute
reduction to the essence”. Throughout his life he was fascinated by
the “high aesthetics and intensity of (…) simplicity”. This
fascination led to signature elements like a repetition of gestural
brushstrokes and subdued structures and a tension between
sobriety and emotion. Despite the apparent calm, there is
movement and despite the seeming superficiality, there is depth. All
those elements in turn resulted in a remarkable continuity in his
body of work. Something Girke himself noted in an interview that
took place in late 2001:
It seems to me that the 1980s had a parallel in my early 1950s
phase, where there are also stronger contrasts and movements,
where the unanticipated, imponderables, also slip in and are
accepted. I’m inclined to believe that since the early 1990s I’ve
been going through another phase where I’m increasingly
referencing my paintings of the early 1960s and 70s, where the
paintings are becoming more tranquil again, more cohesive, more
open-ended and yet more unified, where the colour or pictorial
field is not ploughed up by brushstrokes. (…) I believe that right
now my paintings are again imbued with a largesse, a certain
tranquillity and peace.
An almost monochrome-white picture design with the finest
differentiation in colour and light reached its peak in his works of
the 1970s, of which those for Documenta 6 in 1977 are best
known. His compositions, which had been rhythmitized and full of
gestures onto that point, became maze-like, clearly structured
image fields. In order to attain a subtle shading of white’s
nuances, Girke switched brush and spatula for an airbrush with
which he sprayed a haze of paint onto his canvases. Whereas the
personal flow was almost absent in these serial, structural
arrangements of the 1970s, the gestural moment of the brush
stroke was intensified anew in the 1980s and 1990s, as was the
scope of his palette. The selection of works currently on view in
our gallery focuses on serene and soothing paintings from these
phases: the silky opacity of Untitled (1971) darkens in the grey of
Untitled (1980) and in that same year and later on we see the
return of thicker, vertical brushstrokes. Girke's practice was
dynamic and it’s his painterly signature and brushwork that
injected vivacity into the calmness of his abstract works.
RAIMUND GIRKE
Raimund Girke was born in 1930 in the Lower Siesian town of
Heinzendorf. He grew up in Reichenbach until his family was
deported in 1946, as the territory became part of Poland, after
which they settled in the vicinity of Osnabrück. From 1951 until
1952 he studied at the Werkkunstschule in Hanover and
subsequently attended the Staatlichen Kunstakademie in
Düsseldorf until 1956. Even early on, he enjoyed great success: in
1959 he received the city of Wolfsburg’s prize for painting and in
1962 he was awarded the Kunstpreis der Jugend in Stuttgard.
Between 1966 and 1971 he taught at the Werkkunstschule in
Hanover before following a call to the Hochschule der Künste in
Berlin. Girke lived and worked in Cologne and Berlin until he
passed away in 2002. Today, his work can be found in several
public collections in Germany and abroad.
