A visitor in the guest book raves about a “firework of abstraction”, and anyone who has already had the opportunity to see the current exhibition on KO Götz, the most important German artist of Informalism, in the Lochner Gallery must state that this formulation is absolutely correct. In Götz’s pictures there is momentum, there is power, there is energy: surfaces and lines form whirling vortices, bubbles, waves and spirals, sometimes everything seems to explode and be thrown in all directions. Due to the dynamics and simultaneous harmony, the motifs all appear highly aesthetic, like painted music, and that’s what the artist wanted: “My pictures should have a rhythmic-poetic aura.”
Exhibiting prints from the oeuvre of world-renowned artists has meanwhile become the trademark of the Lochner gallery, which is run purely as a hobby. On the one hand, this has to do with the insurance sums, prints are not what art thieves would take first; the market value is comparatively low. In this case, however, it is actually justified by the artistic work to focus on this part of his work. “Götz is one of those artists for whom printmaking is completely dominant,” says Lochner. There is even a separate catalog raisonné for it. Götz prefers lithography and has been concentrating entirely on this technique since 1980, significantly supported by the printing expert Manfred Hügelow, from whom this work also required a certain amount of ingenuity.
It is the most extensive exhibition of the small gallery to date
The Dachau exhibition features one-color and multi-color lithographs that were created between 1981 and 2014. In addition to the hanging pictures, there are 48 other works in a poster stand, many of which were recently made available by a private collector. In this respect, it can be described as the most comprehensive exhibition of the small art gallery in the old town of Dachau. However, Götz, who was almost always seen with a little pipe in his mouth, also had plenty of time to create his impressive oeuvre: a whopping 103 years. He died in 2017.
Karl Otto Götz, better known as KO, in Niederbreitbach-Wolfenacker (Rhineland-Palatinate) in front of one of his paintings. The recording was made in 2014. At that time, Götz was already 100 years old.
(Photo: Oliver Berg/dpa)
Something is always in motion in Götz’ pictures, while color only plays a subordinate role in his prints.
(Photo: Niels P. Jørgensen)
In the past few days, Josef Lochner has been able to add a few works by KO Götz to his exhibition. A private collector provided the prints.
(Photo: Niels P. Jørgensen)
When Karl Otto Götz was born in Aachen on February 22, 1914, the First World War was just looming on the horizon. Karl’s father worked in the textile industry and he expected his son to follow suit. Of course he didn’t do that, he was interested in completely different things: the construction of radios, aviation, jazz music, which was still frowned upon at the time – and of course art. Until 1933 he attended the Kunstgewerbeschule in Aachen. He did it secretly. Götz must have had his reasons for this.
In 1935 he and a friend came up with the idea of staging a modern art exhibition in the shop window of an empty office supply store, the “Wawil Exhibition”. The Nordic-sounding name concealed the brand of fish food that friends used at home in the aquarium. (Today still available as an antiquarian: “Wawil. Patent protected. Special fish food for all viviparous and self-bearing toothcarps, Berben, etc.”). But the guardians of nationalist Nazi cultural policy were no jokes, and Götz received repeated admonitions to kindly adapt his style to the new customs. He didn’t do it and was banned from painting and exhibiting.
The situation in post-war Germany was hardly better. “When the Second World War ended in 1945, people in Germany didn’t know whether art still existed and whether the conditions for new artistic activity would arise in the foreseeable future,” writes art historian Will Grohmann. It must be remembered that there was lively controversy at the time as to whether it was still possible to write poems in German after Auschwitz. When had art ever been in such a crisis of legitimacy? Everything now had to be rethought.
Orientation towards Western countries was an obvious choice for Götz, and not just because of his roots in Aachen. In France, people were much more open to progressive ideas than in the conservative Federal Republic, where modernity was not very important. Götz made sure that soon changed: as the only German member of the pioneering artist group Cobra, which placed spontaneity and subjectivity at the center of their work, he helped open up the country culturally. As an art lecturer in Düsseldorf, Götz became the teacher of a whole generation of important German artists, such as Gerhard Richter and Sigmar Polke. The previous exhibition in the Lochner gallery was dedicated to the latter.
Everything personal and subjective should be pushed back
To this day, KO Götz is considered the German Informel artist par excellence. In Informal it is about throwing the old principle of pictorial composition overboard, the art should be created as intuitively as possible in a spontaneous, gestural brushwork. This also changed abstract art as it was known up until then: no more building blocks, cones, lines and other geometric figures – the form should dissolve completely.
Götz has developed his own working techniques and processes for this. In the speed of the arm movement, which applies the paint to the canvas with the squeegee and rips it out again in the next step, he tried to push back everything personal and subjective. He once explained that he wanted to exaggerate his subjectivity to such an extent “that it overturned” and that his body motor skills created completely new things in his pictures, as if by magic. Characteristic of this is the verse in his poem “About myself”: “The ideal irascibility / in painting / shoots through the pupil / and idol.” You can say that too.
The work takes only three seconds – the preparatory work takes three years
It is unusual that Götz retained his basic concept, which he had developed around 1952, until he became almost completely blind in old age. For many artists, Informal was just an episode. For Götz it was much more. In this he saw the key to life, for what is life other than a series of metamorphoses, of dissolutions and transformations? Götz, who also saw himself as a scientist, dealt with art very systematically, beyond all spontaneity. It was clear to him that the pool of spontaneous gestures in painting would be exhausted very quickly. In his “Fakturen-Fibel”, an ABC of the smallest form elements developed from observations of nature, he was able to expand the repertoire almost at will, but before this “spontaneous” painting process, the body’s motor skills had to be trained accordingly. It is not for nothing that Götz once pointed out that some of his pictures are created in three to four seconds, but that the preparatory work for them took three to four years.
This shows that formless art is not as formless as it seems or should seem, and often not as abstract at all. If you are honest, you never see abstract art as completely abstract. Man is evolutionary calibrated to identify known forms even where there are none. On the print “Don Quixote A” you will never find the knight of the sad figure, even with the greatest effort. However, two visitors came to the unanimous conclusion that this looks like a human heel, as Josef Lochner explains. Both were doctors.
KO Goetz. Exhibition in the Lochner Gallery, Konrad-Adenauer-Straße 7. Opening times: Thursday: 4 p.m. to 7 p.m., Saturday: 12 p.m. to 3 p.m. Sundays and public holidays: 2 p.m. to 5 p.m. or by appointment, telephone 08131/667818 or 0162/4559699. To be seen until July 23rd.