Lot 54 D

There is scarcely another post-war modernist German artist whose work is currently experiencing more of a renaissance than the diverse oeuvre of the primarily Cologne-based painter Ernst Wilhelm Nay. While an older generation recalls his first successes at the documenta in Kassel and the Venice Biennale, a younger generation is discovering his work and is fascinated by his powerful and boldly colourful paintings. His works have accordingly been selling at extremely high prices on the international art market, and the extensive retrospective of 2022/23, which featured 114 works and was shown at the Kunsthalle Hamburg, Museum Wiesbaden and Museum Küppersmühle, was a magnet for visitors and met with an excellent response in the press.
Nay’s work developed in clearly distinguishable phases. In the best-known, longest and, to date, most successful period of his oeuvre, Nay made the round form of the disc the main motif of his painting. Our picture from 1962 with the evocative title “Dominant Rot” also belongs to this group of so-called “disc paintings”. It is among the later works from this phase in his oeuvre, in which he used the broad strokes of a paint-filled brush to form circular or oval discs. With a painterly gesture, he applied the colours of blue, yellow, green and red – sometimes encircling them with black contours, crossing them back out again or mixing them with white. Working with an intense palette, he composed large and small discs as well as intermediate forms into a powerful chromatic choreography: “the circle, as a geometric figure”, as he writes, “is, for painting, the symbolic form of a universal rotation”. (cited in Scheibler 1990, p. 62). Comparable with America’s “Abstract Expressionism”, Nay has succeeded in creating an unusually dark, energy-filled disc painting in his “Dominant Rot”.