Ernst Wilhelm Nay | Master of the disc
He is considered one of the most important painters and graphic artists of the German post-war period, and his works have left their mark on classical modernism.
Ernst Wilhelm Nay, who was discovered by Karl Hofer (1878-1955) in 1924 after he had initially begun painting autodidactically, developed periods of work of particular conciseness over the various stages of his life. Outstanding are the “Scheibenbilder”, which were created in his longest and most intensive creative period between 1954-1962.
Fascinated by the circle and the disc, these became his sole pictorial motif, which he modulated in the most diverse variations. Soft, pastel, delicate colors alternate with strong and powerful ones, giving his paintings an extraordinary expressiveness. The circular movements of the brushwork are both a challenge and a natural sequence of movements. For Nay, the discs, emerging from a blob, become a system of colored and quantitative proportions that end in complex images.
Disc paintings by Nay are part of Ketterer Kunst’s year-end auction.
