Page 38 - Studio International - October 1966

Below
Ferdinand Kriwet
Poem-painting 1966
Oil
79 3/4 x 51 1/8 in.

Above
Michael Bette
Composition 1966 ►
Oil
391 x 29+ in.
Above right
Sine Hansen
Egg tempera
39f x 47+ in.
Grosser Steindeisser
Galerie Brusberg, Hanover
Right
Hansjerg Maier-Aichen
Balkenfigur 1966
Polymer
45 1/4 x 45 1/4

is generally dynamic and transforms the static elements. lettering in its widest sense, productively and not just
And the third is clearly technological, closer to the reproductively. Although untrained in visual art, he
`modern object' than most British sculptors of his age. has now produced letter-paintings of a high pictorial
The painter Arnold Leissler of Hanover is four years quality. The letter here becomes a sign, an abstraction,
younger and not yet so mature. He uses objects—techno- an ornament, sometimes a personage, without losing its
logical, topographical, organic—in a way not unlike that literary association. Kriwet's Lettrisme makes the transi-
in which Klapheck uses them, but with more stress on tion to the New Abstractionists.
the optical. There is the same sense of the image as a In the case of Alexej Illiitsch Baschlakow of Hanover
symbol—as the coat-of-arms, in Cocteau's phrase—of an- one must use the same term with caution. Baschlakow
other reality. And again there is the crisp sense of form came to Germany as a small boy of eight at the end of
and overall design. the war. His 'Russian' background as a painter he has
The latest and youngest figure in this group is Sine pieced together for himself. One notes the fragments of
Hansen of Brunswick, seven years younger than Klaphek, Constructivism and folk art. Yet the pictorial values—the
and something of a sensation at this year's exhibition of Optical element, the complicated composition, the dyna-
the DEUTSCHE KUNSTLERBUND. She too concerns herself mism and the hard vitality— are all his own, and as non-
with objects—adjustable spanners, pliers, scissors, has Constructive as can be.
a strong sense of formal design and uses her colour in an Born in 1940, Hansjerg Maier-Aichen is another painter
optical way. Her sense of ornament brings her near to who made his mark in this year's Kunstlerbund. His
another tendency that is described below, but the main Balkenfiguren (perhaps most appropriately translated as
individuality of her work is its humour, comedy of situa- 'stripe-figures') are New Abstraction in the classical
tion, which gives to her objects an animism as strong as sense: a painting of intention, hard-edged, with strong
Klapheck's but quite different in kind. unbroken colour, but neither geometrical nor intellectual.
Mutatis mutandis, the same thing applies to the three-
Ferdinand Kriwet (Düsseldorf) is the same age but has dimensional work in colour of Ed Sommer of Stuttgart
been something of a prodigy. He brought out his first and Joachim Bandau of Cologne. An industrial designer
novel when he was 19, Rotor, and the year after published and a critic, Ed Sommer's constructions in coloured
`visual texts', which were exhibited in 1963. This was in acryl-glass are all very conscious, as one would expect.
his own words an 'attempt' to employ the possibilities of They are also highly sensational. Contrasts of stiff and
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