Rainer Gross

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Overview

Ware Twins, 2021

Oil on canvas
Two-part, each 61 x 51
Signed, dated and titled on the verso
Provenance:
Studio of the artist
Literature:
Blau: Von farblichen Akzenten zur Monochromie V, Ausst.-Kat. Galerie Koch, Hannover 2023, S. 46f.
Rainer Gross's "Ware Twins" show the artist's characteristic formal design of Abstract Expressionism and constructive features in the form of two rectangular picture supports. The colour scheme of the "Ware Twins" is determined by the triad of the primary colours red, yellow and blue, with orange accents and the use of different shades of blue breaking up the austerity of the triad of primary colours. The lively, dynamic, relief-like, encrusted surface structure of the two-part work, which belongs to Rainer Gross' Contact Painting group of works, is the result of the creative process.
By thematising the modern triad of primary colours, Rainer Gross takes up a leitmotif of 20th century art. In the early phase of abstract, non-objective art, this was elevated to a metaphor of pure painting, beginning with the triptych "Pure Colour Red, Pure Colour Yellow, Pure Colour Blue" (1921) by Alexander Rodchenko and the reduction of the colour spectrum to red, yellow and blue by the Dutch De Stijl movement, and has not lost its fascination for artists to this day.
Even though Rainer Gross' works are non-representational, the artist allows the viewer to make associations and personal impressions: the predominance and choice of blue tones in interplay with the bright yellow, floating patches of colour that seem to sparkle in the depths of the azure trigger the idea of a starry night sky as well as the thought of an abstract analogy to Vincent van Gogh's Starry Nights ("Nuit étoilée sur le Rhône", 1888, Paris, Musée d'Orsay; "La Nuit étoilée", 1889, New York, Museum of Modern Art).