Georg Karl Pfahler

‘Colour has a value of its own, colour is weight, colour is quality, colour possesses an inherent limitation, of itself, through itself, through other colours, colour creates space, colour is form and space’ – Georg Karl Pfahler, 1968.

Rising to prominence in the early 1960s as one of the first hard edge painters in Europe, known for his vibrant and colourful works, Georg Karl Pfahler was an internationally recognised artist who represented Germany at the Venice Biennale in 1970 alongside Günther Uecker, Heinz Mack, and Thomas Lenk; and at the São Paulo Biennale in 1981. Pfahler dedicated his entire career to the investigation of the relationship between colour, shape and space, an objective he steadfastly pursued until his death in 2002. In doing so he was—and remains to this day—at the forefront of the colour field painting movement.

Pfahler was born in 1926 and studied at the Kunstakademie Stuttgart under Willi Baumeister, graduating in 1954. Influenced by the tradition of European Art Informel, he quickly adopted an innovative abstract geometric painting style, with block-like forms on crisp backgrounds appearing on his canvasses as early as 1962. It was then that Pfahler continued to reduce his style even further to exclusively focus on the dynamic between shapes, and to examine the deeper relationships between space and colour. In doing so Pfahler became a thought leader and one of the first European artists to simultaneously work in action, colour field, and hard edge painting—styles that his American contemporaries like Frank Stella, Ellsworth Kelly, Kenneth Noland and Leon Polk Smith, among others, explored as well.

In the late 1970s Pfahler’s work began to take increasingly gestural forms, introducing sweeping blocks of coloured shapes set against minimalistic black or white backgrounds, a stylistic preoccupation that continued to influence his work throughout the 1980s and into the early 1990s. By the late 1990s Pfahler’s compositions had progressed into a new and final direction, where a greater number of forms, layered on top of each other almost like a collage of coloured shapes are distributed across the surface of the canvas, adding a new and never before seen spatial dimension to his paintings.