for bernhard sandfort, the colored parallel line, painted in the early pictures is virtually always his chosen form. in the later multi-part color paintings, the number of squares is fixed, as is the number of lines, with their length from edge to edge. norbert thomas uses the line as a means of directional view, sometimes moving around a center point with a certain logic, often clearly black. clearly moving.
bernhard sandfort began as an autodidact. in his first group of works, pictures painted by hand with colored parallel lines. picture forms mirrored or in diagonal divisions, often in opposite directions. the even, very thin parallel lines resulted in fine, sometimes increasing color sequences, never wild outbursts. the endurance and mastery of the form also demonstrates a strong will to control the overall form. this is the color flow of even, strong lines, not carefully controlled, but almost tender and light in the overall flow. we are thrilled to be able to show the largest group of works from this period, 20 vertical images, each with an increasing color sequence, this sequence of images following a colored rhythm. this is his subject up until the end of the 1960s. in the 1970s he began to question these clear assumptions for himself and for his observation of the social environment and, with the help of chance, broke through this structure. he sees that this use of chance, in contrast to strict control, and yet happening in an environment of rules, which is called controlled chance today. the setting: he takes the form of a square, he paints these squares with a netwrok of colored lines, sometimes also parallel double lines, in colors that he freely chooses. the squares can be combined, he decides to paint pictures with squares of the same size, he can create complete paintings, e.g. 4 x 4 squares, but these must not be larger than his working wall. he determines the number of lines that should create his network. now he uses chance, so he avoids the risk of the tastefully beautiful picture. chance creates a direction of the line for the picture. other combinations are possible, but no better to see, difficult to achieve with the heavy image. for the artist and the viewer trust in these decisions is cultivated. the initial curiosity is gone, he can calmly take a step back and now think about the size of the picture, about the need to use chance, the strategies of the painting, its colors, he can transfer this to people in their actions, about equality in their diversity and the diversity in their equality, to strive for these here and to present its results. this brings him to challenges such as the producer's gallery, the „augenladen“ (the “eye shop“), around 1971 his first dialogical „augenladen” production, the "museum of questions ", dialogical: one asks, one listens, thinks and answers. he asks for an answer in a poetic but compelling way. he publishes together with dieter hacker, “beauty sometimes has to be true.”
a very good friend of bernhard sandfort was norbert thomas, in many ways his counterpart, sandfort was self-taught, thomas studied art and art education at the academy in kassel. the first generation of kassler concrete artists with hartmut böhm, kunibert fritz, werner krieglstein, klaus müller-domnick, friedhelm tschentscher, günter neusel, sometimes rainer kallhardt and wolfgang schmidt they were confronted with an art of realistic, surreal, and action painting. the kasselerconcrete artists were the counterpart to that. an international, comprehensible, sometimes geometric, mathematical, scientific, minimalist art that needs its space, not just as a picture, as a quote hanging on the wall, this is what the kassler concrete artists made of the effort to build up the international documenta. thomas, who was 10 years his junior, got into good company, experimented and created a wide range of work with many possibilities, such as grid changes, isolation of elements, which could then condense and compress into long rows of images. he used extreme formats from long horizontal rows of pictures, to the point of quietly dissolving in long vertical picture formats. norbertthomas uses the wall as a reflecting surface for open picture forms painted on the back, he cuts out surfaces from his wall panels, which use the wall as a painting surface, he continues his wall body with residual geometric surfaces, whose shadows form a second wandering wall surface as a shadow shape. he uses free geometric surfaces that seem to come out of the floor or the wall, the surfaces of which are invisible because they are open and non-existent, but which still have the possibility of having a surrounding metal edge, again forming shadow surfaces in addition to the body, make time lapses visible. everything is simple and obvious, just difficult to describe. we are excited and invite you to come.
