In Karl Otto Götz’s paintings, speed, spontaneity and rapid gesture become symbols of individual freedom. His artistic process finds him applying thin paint to a canvas lying on the floor. With a squeegee – which he originally used to remove excess paint – he pushes and directs the mass of paint over the canvas. Götz combines various layers with blue and yellow paint. The gestures and colour streaks are traces of the movement and dynamics of the painting process. He shared this ‘automatic’ approach to painting with Hans Hartung, Georges Mathieu, Jean Fautrier, Wols and representatives of Surrealism – especially their spokesman André Breton – with whom he maintained active contact from as early as 1949.
Previous owner: Sammlung Pierre Janlet, Brussels; Galerie F.A.C. Prestel, Frankfurt; Ketterer Kunst, Munich, 1976; Lempertz, Cologne, 1995
Acquisition: Reinhard Ernst Collection, Ketterer Kunst GmbH & Co KG, Munich, 2013
Solo exhibition:
1962
‘Karl Otto Götz’, Galleria L’Attico, Rome, Italy
Group exhibitions:
2017
‘Ersehnte Freiheit. Abstraktion in den 1950er Jahren’, Museum Giersch, Frankfurt
1959
‘Prix de l´association belge des critiques d’art’, Palais des Beaux-Arts, Charleroi, Belgium
In Karl Otto Götz’s paintings, speed, spontaneity and rapid gesture become symbols of individual freedom. His artistic process finds him applying thin paint to a canvas lying on the floor. With a squeegee – which he originally used to remove excess paint – he pushes and directs the mass of paint over the canvas so that the positive of the stroke is often rendered a negaive due to the lack of paint. In 10.5.1957 Brien-Elven Götz combines these different layers with blue and yellow paint. The gestures and colour streaks are traces of the movement and dynamics of the painting process.
In the early 1940s, Götz used a very similar technique when he began creating monotypes working with printing ink on a glass plate: drawing in and moving around the paint with squeegee and brush, the speed of the action was highly significant. Paper would be pressed flat on the plate by hand then removed. He shared this ‘automatic’ approach to painting with Hans Hartung, Georges Mathieu, Jean Fautrier, Wols and representatives of Surrealism – especially their spokesman André Breton – with whom he maintained active contact from as early as 1949. In 1952, he exhibited in the group show of the Zimmergalerie Franck in Frankfurt am Main, which went down in history as the first manifestation of Informel art in Germany under the term ‘Quadriga’. As a professor at the Düsseldorf Art Academy, Götz, who died in 2017 at the age of 103, trained several generations of artists between 1959 and 1979, including Gerhard Richter and Gotthard Graubner.
