Peter Brüning

Peter Brüning Untitled Around 1964 Oil and chalk on canvas 149 x 200 cm. Framed. - With slight signs of age. Marie-Luise Otten, Peter Brüning, Studies on Development and Work, catalog raisonné, Cologne 1988, WVZ no. 557 Provenance Private collection, North Rhine-Westphalia This unusually bright, large-format painting by the Düsseldorf-born painter Peter Brüning belongs to a group of pictures that heralds the transition to a new stylistic phase. Starting from works with completely free, spontaneous gestures, he arrived around 1964 at paintings with content-bound, repeatable symbols from cartography. As with every new stylistic phase, he prepares this one with a series of chalk drawings. Even in the comparatively small works on paper, Brüning works with sweeping, curved and mostly red-yellow arcs, in which he inscribes either small black circles or straight lines in the manner of coordinate systems (Marie-Luise Otten, Peter Brüning, Cologne 1988, p.165). In 1964, he also transferred the forms, which are also reminiscent of production curves from the economy, for the first time to his canvas paintings, which he executed - coming from drawing - with colored chalks and oil. To the curved, red-yellow arcs he adds black, strictly diagonal or horizontal strokes, as well as yellow, green and blue color clouds, all of which are integrated into an underlying rectangular scheme. In 1970, Brüning also reflected on his change in style, writing, "Since 1962 and 1963, as the paintings became more and more like forms that were juxtaposed and became single characters, first, the space became flatter, and second, the painted forms took on more independence. This process then culminated for me in a restlessness that made me more and more aware of schematic representations, which I consciously included in the painting process, but always in an open form." (Quoted from Otten 1988, p. 165). Created at the beginning of this stylistic new beginning, the offered painting is a decidedly important and attractive picture.