1496 - Horst de Marées (1896, Weimar – 1988, Otterndorf)

Horst de Marées (1896, Weimar – 1988, Otterndorf) Landscape with Verdun-en-Lauragais in the Foreground A late work by the artist featuring a landscape constructed in a flat, tectonic manner from color forms outlined in black, straddling the boundary between representation and abstraction. The landscape is inspired by the area around Verdun-en-Lauragais on the edge of the French Pyrenees, where the artist maintained a summer residence between 1963 and 1988; the small village itself can be seen at the bottom of the painting as a geometric formation featuring a church. De Marées studied at the art school in Weimar under Walter Klemm and, beginning in 1919, at the Academy of Fine Arts in Munich under Hugo von Habermann. His oeuvre ranges from expressive figuration to two-dimensional abstraction. Having recovered from a prolonged illness, he resumed his work in 1963. The paintings from this period now appear almost entirely non-representational as pure formal structures, yet they always retain their inspiration in visible reality. Tempera on paper or cardboard. Mat size: 60 cm x 82 cm. Framed. See additional works from this series in: *Line and Color*. Horst de Marées, Otterndorf 2002, pp. 27–29. Tempera on paper.