958 - W. Riedel, Scantily Dressed Women at a Street Corner with Dog, Figurative Painting, dated 1981

W. Riedel, Scantily Dressed Women at a Street Corner with Dog, Figurative Painting, dated 1981 probably acrylic on chipboard, signed and dated 1981 lower right, group of young women at a house corner with brown pillars and steps before a dark ground, in the left foreground a woman with long dark hair and a red blossom in her hair in a red off-the-shoulder minidress, a red string of beads in her raised hands, at the corner four further women in underwear and short dresses, with nail polish, lipstick and hand mirror, one with a cigarette, in front a slender black and white dog with open mouth, age-appropriate condition, scratches, paint losses, image 120x100 cm (HxW) Figure paintings with street scenes and studies of milieu belong to the Critical Realism of the 1970s, represented in Berlin by the group Aspekt around Ulrich Baehr, Hans-Jürgen Diehl, Wolfgang Petrick and Peter Sorge, whose forerunners include Otto Dix and George Grosz. The present picture of 1981, with its group of figures and the dog, belongs to this period and, as a street scene, combines the milieu scene with the figurative realism of the painting of the 1980s.