Ernst Wilhelm Nay

Ernst Wilhelm Nay With white spindle 1967 Oil on canvas. 160 x 150 cm. Framed. Signed, dated and titled on the reverse of the stretcher 'NAY - 'With white spindle' 1967' and marked with a directional arrow. - In good, freshly colored condition. With faint craquelé. Scheibler 1244 Provenance Private property; Galerie Thomas, Munich (on the stretcher with the gallery label); private collection North Rhine-Westphalia Ernst Wilhelm Nay's painterly development culminated in the reduced, deliberately two-dimensional works of the second half of the 1960s. With undiminished, even rekindled creative power and creative energy, the artist once again found a completely new mode of expression in these last years. The magnificent, large-scale painting "Mit weißer Spindel" (With White Spindle), which he created in the year before his death, excellently brings out the characteristics of this phase of his work. The two-dimensionality, by means of which Nay now concentrated on the pure expressiveness of color and form, now reached its climax. An anthropomorphic vocabulary of forms occupies the entire picture ground in a non-hierarchical flatness. The mostly vertical orientation creates the impression that it is a section of a large whole in flux. The color palette of the late works, limited to a few tones, is taken to extremes in the present painting; only the primary colors red, yellow, and blue flow coolly and radiantly in gently sweeping curves around the white spindle shape that gives the title. "It is worth a lifetime to penetrate so far that the real color image can arise and the color thereby sounds in such a way that, without any special intention on the part of the artist, the human becomes vivid, the human and the creaturely in a new, unknown formulation," Nay wrote in October 1967 (quoted from: E.W. Nay. Reader. Selbstzeugnisse und Schriften, Cologne 2002, p. 297).