Raimund Girke was born in Heinzendorf in 1930 and, like so many other German artists of his generation, lived through the raising of the Iron Curtain between the Eastern zone, his birth place, and the Western zone. To some extent he lived life as a ‘foreigner’ then, and this was reinforced by his birth in Lower Silesia: once part of Germany it was awarded to Poland after the Second World War. His whole life was marked by his many relocations around Germany; he died in Cologne in 2002.

Girke’s painting immediately constituted the avant-garde in European art, from almost a decade after the end of the second global conflict. In fact, his research cools informal abstract art to gradually strip off the subjective style that characterised it. Girke’s art then leans towards more concrete investigation, aiming for an analytical approach that concentrated on the study of merely physical phenomena such as luminous vibration, rhythm and movement. Since the very beginning, his activity has concentrated on research into white and the countless variations that can emerge from it. His study especially takes the colour in its material appearance into account and this, more diluted and extended in thinner layers, is alternated with denser coats. White is often in dialogue with grey, ochre and various tones of blue, which when layered together create a chromatic melody reminiscent of atmospheric light. Girke’s art stands out for its poetic and stylistic coherence; nevertheless, while remaining largely tied to action painting, along the way it leaves us to hazard a comparison with some of the important trends that developed in Europe and the United States in the second half of the last century.

Girke began his academic studies in 1951, attending first the Werkkunstschule in Hannover and subsequently the Staatliche Kunstakademie in Düsseldorf: a well-known and prestigious institution. At the end of the Second World War, the city of Düsseldorf established itself as a symbol of Germany’s cultural rebirth, as the country reinitiated dialogue with international artistic realities after the Nazi restrictions. The city became animated by the presence of galleries and foreign artists and was receptive to the trends established in the United States and other European countries between the late Forties and the early Fifties. It was in this context that Girke’s meditations on abstract art matured, from which he developed a synthetic painting style consisting of very few colours and absolutely void of any figurative reference, in which a woven structure similar to the knit of a sweater dominated. His work evolved over the following decade with further reduction of the chromatic scale, almost taking the artist to the extremes of monochrome. This new executive technique coupled layers of colour applied in a horizontal direction, where analysis of optical perception became the dominant theme. In the late Seventies, he returned to action painting and white was the only colour used. This phase of Girke’s painting was witnessed at Documenta 6, which the artist took part in in 1977. During the Eighties and Nineties, Girke officially assumed a role at the forefront of the German art scene, and new features were observed in his work over these twenty years: white began to be tainted with various tones of grey and blue and the action element was once again reinforced with interwoven brushstrokes, while the substantial rigour of the overall and the slim chromatic selection remained unchanged.

Raimund Girke’s work has been exhibited in numerous museums in Europe and the United States and is part of various public and private collections.

Studio G7 dedicated the solo exhibition Raimund Girke to the artist in 1990.

Perceptions is another exhibition in the path of research that the gallery has undertaken ever since it first opened and will exhibit works that represent a large part of Raimund Girke’s artistic production, with particular focus on the Eighties.

Studio G7 Gallery
Via Val D'Aposa, 4A
Bologna 40123 Italy
Ph. +39 051 2960371
info@galleriastudiog7.it
www.galleriastudiog7.it

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