Herbert Zangs

< 2 / 9 >
Overview

Untitled, 1970er Jahre

Acrylic on cardboard
37,5 × 50 cm
Signed and dated "57" Year of creation: 70s
Provenance:
Studio of the artist
Hartmut Manthei, Mönchengladbach
Private collection, Holland
Zang's composition consists of a black and blue ground with overlying vertical line structures in white. The artist has used a scraping tool to partially blur both the colours of the painting ground and the linear colour structures above it, resulting in transparent overlapping of the layers of paint. The appeal of the composition arises from the interaction of the colours and the serial structures, which give it a certain visual dynamism, a slight vibration.

Emmy de Martelaere dates Zang's composition to the 1970s. The artist's backdating of the work to 1957 results from his approach of not always dating works according to the year of their creation, but rather the year in which the respective pictorial idea was found. In his search for new materials and working methods, Zangs began to work with various scraping tools such as palette knives in 1957, a technique that he repeatedly took up and developed further in later phases of his work.

The 1970s are of great significance in the artist's career. In 1972, Adolf Luther rediscovered Herbert Zangs' "Verweißungen" and white "Reliefbilder" from the 1950s, which had met with little understanding in the years of their creation. In 1974, these were then shown in a retrospective of the artist's work at the Westfälischer Kunstverein in Münster, an exhibition that aroused interest in Zangs' work. In 1977, the artist was finally represented at documenta 6 in Kassel with current works. Anette Brunner