Menhir Arte Contemporanea Gallery in Milan dedicates a solo exhibition to Winfred Gaul, “Malerei“, curated by Marco Meneguzzo and Alberto Rigoni, starting from February 16th and finishing on April 14th, 2018.
Winfred Gaul born in Düsseldorf in 1928.
From 1949 to 1950 he studied History of German Art and Literature at the University of Cologne and then attended the Academy of Fine Arts in Stuttgart in 1950.
He held his first solo exhibition in 1956 at the Gurlitt Gallery in Munich and in 1959 he took part in "Documenta 2" in Kassel.
He is one of the German painters who most marked abstract research in the second half of the 20th century.
Especially the Geometrical and the Analytical periods made his works known to the general public.
His connection with Italy has been very strong, the German artist, in fact, worked frequently with Italian galleries (La Polena of Genoa and Peccolo of Livorno) and was a tireless investigator of the abstraction in Italy.
His role in the birth of Analytical Painting in the Seventies was fundamental: together with the compatriot critic Klaus Honnef and his Italian friend and colleague Gianfranco Zappettini, with texts and works, he gave a decisive contribution to the international development of the current.
With his "Markierungen" returned to "Documenta 6" in 1977.
During the '80s his production is characterized by works on cardboard called "Black Paintings" where the casual gesture returns, while the works of the last two decades are characterized by chromatic contrasts.
He died in Düsseldorf in 2003.
The exhibition presents several examples of Gaul’s pictorial investigation: the geometrical works that evolve from the "Signs" to a research that reminds Concrete Art, with the colours that create shapes themselves, rather than being delimited, the analytical ones of the "Markierungen" series where the intervention of the painter can be limited to a simple sign on the rough canvas, representing the grammatical meaning of the pictorial language.