Winfred Gaul (1928 Düsseldorf - 2003 ibid.) (F), 5-1-59'

oil on canvas, 140 cm x 100 cm, signed on verso, dated 59, titled, partly slightly craquelured, Provenance: Galerie Änne Abels, Cologne (gallery label on verso), Galerie Marianne Hennemann, Bonn (gallery label on verso)

Winfred Gaul was a German painter who studied art history and German language and literature at the University of Cologne and (1949-53) painting under Willi Baumeister at the Stuttgart Academy. During the 1950s, his art was influenced by Informel, to which phase the work we are presenting, '5-1-59', can certainly be assigned. The art of Informel can be regarded as a collective term for an abstract art movement that formed in Paris around 1945 and stands out from so-called abstraction because of its rejection of an organised formal structure. The designation of this style, which in itself gave rise to Tachism, Action Painting and Art Brut, goes back to a coinage of words by the French critic Michael Tapié, who first spoke about the ''significance of the formless''. Gaul's work is not really formless, as it certainly carries a form in its colour tangles and swirl-like structure that proves itself through a spontaneous rhythm - which makes the work an impulsive and immediate expression of the colour gradients of blue and green as well as white and black. In the decades that followed, Gaul developed his own art, which he knew how to articulate. Inspired by the vocabulary of traffic signs and strongly coloured abstract signal imagery, he understands them as hieroglyphs of a new metropolitan art. His more recent works deal with the phenomena of colour and form in drawings and paintings in the sense of analytical painting.