1192 - Karl Fred Dahmen, Abstract Composition, Informel Print of Post-War Modernism, 1980

Karl Fred Dahmen, Abstract Composition, Informel Print of Post-War Modernism, 1980 (1917 Stolberg to 1981 Preinersdorf), colour etching and blind embossing on paper, signed in pencil at lower right, dated 1980 at lower centre, numbered 87/100 at lower left. Over a cream-toned ground with a finely drawn linear structure lies a web of ochre and grey-brown incisions; at the lower right a dark grey, densely hatched dome swells up, overlapped by a broad dark area at the lower edge of the sheet, while the upper edge is bounded by an embossed grey-brown bar with a narrow red-brown line. Good condition, image 17.5x14 cm (HxW), behind glass, framed, the frame rubbed, overall 49x37 cm (HxW). Karl Fred Dahmen is among the earliest and most important representatives of Informel in Germany. After the school of applied arts in Aachen and an apprenticeship as a commercial artist he was a co-founder of the Neue Aachener Gruppe in 1952, a member of Gruppe 53 in 1959 and in the same year a participant in documenta II. From 1964 he came to prominence with material pictures, object boxes and padded pictures, and in 1967 he was appointed professor at the Academy of Fine Arts in Munich, where Günther Förg was among his students. The combination of colour etching and blind embossing is the signature of his graphic work; the embossing carries the thinking about materials in his paintings into the sheet. Works by Dahmen are held in the Centre Pompidou and the Neue Nationalgalerie in Berlin. A collector's sheet of German post-war modernism.