7275 - Grützke, Johannes

Grützke, Johannes Encounter While Digging Pastel on brown packing paper. 1983. 130 x 100 cm. Signed “Johannes Grützke” in red pastel chalk and dated in the lower right corner. No longer at Holeczek. Is it a grave or a harmless hole in the ground? The man—it is Grützke himself—is digging out the deep pit in his characteristic white painter’s pants. He is already waist-deep in the earth and, with his spade raised and his pants slightly gaping from the hard labor, looks up at the woman with an expressively distorted, exaggerated facial expression. Of her, however, only her feet at the edge of the pit and the hem of her long, flowered dress are visible. Grützke depicts this scene—whose meaning remains enigmatic—in intense colors, capturing all the elements of the image with his characteristic chalk-based grid hatching in a confident and easily recognizable manner; yet he offers us no interpretation. Time and again, Grützke uses historical settings for his contemporary-style pictorial stages, mixing historical and contemporary figures and linking reality and fiction. Here, it is the allusion to burials that the artist plays with. In 1979, he began a long-standing collaboration with director Peter Zadek, for whose productions he created set and backdrop designs. Provenance: Private collection, North Rhine-Westphalia Exhibition: Johannes Grützke. Portraits, Kallmann Museum, Ismaning 2013 (ill. in: kallmann-museum.de, accessed March 7, 2024) - Please request condition reports for the lots, as the condition is only listed in the catalog in exceptional cases. - Please ask for condition reports for individual lots, as the condition is usually not mentioned in the catalog.