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拍品专文
‘Just as a composer works with sounds, I wanted to work with colours as a means of combining rhythm, values, dynamics and series’ (Ernst Wilhelm Nay)
Standing two metres in height, Ernst Wilhelm Nay’s Gelb und Silbergrau (Yellow and Silver-Grey) is a striking cascade of overlapping discs, the artist’s signature motif. Shimmering silver and black orbs give way to two yellow discs that glow almost cosmologically against the darker ground. The juxtaposition of light and dark was one that the artist returned to throughout his career as he explored chromatic relationships. Painted in 1961, Gelb und Silbergrau was included in that year’s Pittsburgh International Exhibition of Contemporary Painting and Sculpture at the Carnegie Institute of Art, where it was displayed alongside works by Robert Rauschenberg, Joan Mitchell and Francis Bacon, among others.
Gelb und Silbergrau marks an important period in Nay’s oeuvre. A colourist above all, he had begun his disc paintings, or Scheibenbilder, in 1954, with the aim of further delving into the correspondences between tonalities. He believed that interplays of colour could fill a painting with life, musicality and movement, and the resulting canvases catapulted him onto the international stage. In 1955, he had his first exhibition in the United States, at the Kleemann Galleries, New York, and participated in documenta I in Kassel and the third São Paulo Biennal. The following year, Nay represented Germany at the Venice Biennale. By the time the present work was created, Nay had an established international presence and was well known in the United States. He would go on to spend much of 1962 and 1963 touring the country, visiting its museums, and meeting artists such as Robert Motherwell and Mark Rothko.
Nay’s Scheibenbilder lack any external reference or symbolism. As such, the subject of these works is the paint itself and the chromatic rhythms that cover a canvas’ surface. Playing with the relationship between structure and tone, Nay’s colours vary in opacity to produce a density that appears to extend beyond the pictorial plane. For the artist, abstract forms such as the disc were never meant to be seen as inert or static. Rather, they exist as if in constant motion, imbuing each composition with a feeling of vastness that reaches towards the infinite. Nay often spoke of the idea of a flat space and works such as Gelb und Silbergrau seem to possess their own internal dynamism. The present work is a symphony of movement, and although the composition may appear impulsive, it was in fact precisely planned: as Nay explained, ‘Just as a composer works with sounds, I wanted to work with colours as a means of combining rhythm, values, dynamics and series to form a surface’ (‘Notes by E. W. Nay’, Ernst Wilhelm Nay, exh. cat. Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam 1998, p. 104).
Standing two metres in height, Ernst Wilhelm Nay’s Gelb und Silbergrau (Yellow and Silver-Grey) is a striking cascade of overlapping discs, the artist’s signature motif. Shimmering silver and black orbs give way to two yellow discs that glow almost cosmologically against the darker ground. The juxtaposition of light and dark was one that the artist returned to throughout his career as he explored chromatic relationships. Painted in 1961, Gelb und Silbergrau was included in that year’s Pittsburgh International Exhibition of Contemporary Painting and Sculpture at the Carnegie Institute of Art, where it was displayed alongside works by Robert Rauschenberg, Joan Mitchell and Francis Bacon, among others.
Gelb und Silbergrau marks an important period in Nay’s oeuvre. A colourist above all, he had begun his disc paintings, or Scheibenbilder, in 1954, with the aim of further delving into the correspondences between tonalities. He believed that interplays of colour could fill a painting with life, musicality and movement, and the resulting canvases catapulted him onto the international stage. In 1955, he had his first exhibition in the United States, at the Kleemann Galleries, New York, and participated in documenta I in Kassel and the third São Paulo Biennal. The following year, Nay represented Germany at the Venice Biennale. By the time the present work was created, Nay had an established international presence and was well known in the United States. He would go on to spend much of 1962 and 1963 touring the country, visiting its museums, and meeting artists such as Robert Motherwell and Mark Rothko.
Nay’s Scheibenbilder lack any external reference or symbolism. As such, the subject of these works is the paint itself and the chromatic rhythms that cover a canvas’ surface. Playing with the relationship between structure and tone, Nay’s colours vary in opacity to produce a density that appears to extend beyond the pictorial plane. For the artist, abstract forms such as the disc were never meant to be seen as inert or static. Rather, they exist as if in constant motion, imbuing each composition with a feeling of vastness that reaches towards the infinite. Nay often spoke of the idea of a flat space and works such as Gelb und Silbergrau seem to possess their own internal dynamism. The present work is a symphony of movement, and although the composition may appear impulsive, it was in fact precisely planned: as Nay explained, ‘Just as a composer works with sounds, I wanted to work with colours as a means of combining rhythm, values, dynamics and series to form a surface’ (‘Notes by E. W. Nay’, Ernst Wilhelm Nay, exh. cat. Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam 1998, p. 104).