(born Aachen in 1914)
“Chytt”, signed K. O. Götz, titled, signed, dated K. O. Götz 1959 on the reverse, mixed media on canvas, 145 x 175 cm, framed, (PP)

Provenance:
Galleria L’Attico, Rome
Private Collection, Italy

Literature:
Will Grohmann/Edouard Jaguer/Enrico Crispolti/Kenneth B. Sawyer, Karl Otto Götz, Edizioni dell’Attico, Rome 1962 with ill. (no page ref.); K.O. Götz, Memories and Oeuvre, Catalogue raisonné, Dusseldorf 1983, Vol. 1b, no. 957, page 856, with ill.

“In his own words, Götz writes with liquid paint (to which he refers as mixed media) and a broad brush, first committing his painterly rhythm to the light-coloured ground (positive form), then lacerating this glut of colour with some smaller or larger instrument (negative form), after which (in a third step) he finally writes into the picture with a dry brush while the paint is still wet. Later modifications or retouches are not tolerated because they would thwart the uniqueness of the process. Following intensive meditation, the picture is made very quickly, within seconds, plus the time needed to check the results after each of the three work stages. If the picture is not considered sufficiently accomplished, it will be erased. In this way, occasionally as many as twenty pictures are produced and destroyed again on a single day of painting, until eventually one is up to the mark. This procedure has hardly changed since 1953. The consequences of this specific painting process are multifaceted. Positive and negative forms influence one another, changing roles and suggesting space, which, however, is subsequently annulled through the third intervention made with the dry brush. What remains is the ground, which nevertheless still contains traces of colour, and the paint, either applied more thickly or more liquidly, flung away or dammed up. There are no longer any formal elements in the conventional sense, but passages of light and dark heading in different directions. […] The faster the hand, i.e., the swifter the sweeps and passages are made, the greater the automatism involved and the resulting anonymity. This is how Götz works. […] The painter’s trance-like confidence is encouraged by his environment and successes, with the gestural creations of forms becoming more and more differentiated, so that we experience mirages of unlikely events that are plausible all the same. This confidence might jeopardize the painter’s integrity and tempt him to produce repetitions and variations. Götz coped with this danger by radically altering course in 1959, now fathoming his potentials in schemes that appear chaotic from the outside.”
As in the work offered here, he ventures towards “fierce collisions and interruptions in which the equilibrium threatens to topple, and yet the very approach chosen in these works proves the method’s fruitfulness.”