#graubner

Graubner’s art is characterised by his unique philosophy and the use of color in his work. He began developing his own style in 1959, while he studied under K.O. Götz. Before that, Graubner’s work had been characterised by using color sparingly, in shapes and on the edges of the canvas, but, from 1955 onwards, he had already experimented with different approaches towards color, at first with watercolor and later on canvas. Instead of focusing on shapes, he began to use color lavishly.

About 1960, the artist produced flat panel paintings with surfaces built up of differentiated nebulous color formations, the application of color in layers of varying degrees of transparency opening up the picture surface, producing a color formation of indefinite depth comparable to the paintings of Mark Rothko.

In the 1960s, Graubner mounted picture-size colored cushions onto his paintings and used Perlon fabric in an attempt to enhance the spatial effect of color surfaces. These works were displayed in Alfred Schmela’s gallery in Düsseldorf.

Between 1968 and 1972 he did what he called “Nebelräume” [“Fog Spaces”].

Graubner never allowed his style to be dictated by the current fashions or trends. He developed his own style of using color as the medium through which his work announced itself, allowing it to work independently of any connection to any kind of representation or theme. According to Helga Meister, his works have sensibility, feeling and meditative force.[50]However, his paintings are only at first glance monochrome; as a closer look reveals, they are in fact polychrome. They “breathe”; they live; their colors, even though fixed on canvas, have movement that stirs the imagination as much as his “fog-spaces” of the sixties, in which he continued the romantic tradition of Caspar David Friedrich. Moreover, his “color-space bodies” (“Farbraumkörper”) have been described by art historian Max Imdahl as “picture-objects” in which “color-space and body, intangible vision and tangible facticity cooperate in a special interrelationship.”

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