GOLLER, BRUNO
1901 Gummersbach - 1998 Düsseldorf

Title: Schwarze Wolke.
Date: 1964.
Technique: Oil on canvas.
Measurement: 120 x 100cm.
Notation: Signed lower right: Bruno Goller.
Frame/Pedestal: Framed.


Provenance:
- Galerie Michael Werner, Cologne (label verso)
- Galerie Setareh, Düsseldorf
- Kasper König Collection, Berlin

This work is registered under the number 6402 in the Bruno Goller Archive, Literature and Art Institute Hombroich.

Bruno Goller is a German painter known for his unconventional and minimalist depictions of everyday life. His works are characterized by clear lines and a restrained colour palette. As a professor at the Düsseldorf Art Academy, he influenced numerous generations of artists.

The reserved painter Bruno Goller
Goller, whose early work was largely destroyed when his studio was hit by a firebomb in 1943, is described as an introverted person. The artist, who rarely and unwillingly sold works, lived a reclusive life and rarely left his hometown of Düsseldorf. As he grew older, Goller increasingly followed a ritualized daily routine, the interruption of which also meant a break in his productivity. The artist saw modernism as an opportunity to develop and shape his own artistic language, free from all conventions. When looking at his oeuvre, it is remarkable that current issues relating to artistic discourse hardly feature in his works. They follow almost syntactical procedures and distance themselves from the arbitrariness of surrealism.

Pictures as vessels
The artist began to frame his paintings and drawings in black at an early stage. It seems as if Goller wanted to separate his works from the outside world, perhaps even protect them. His canvases look like vessels that Goller fills with themes that have meaning for him. These often have connections to his childhood. In many works there are references to ornamental wickerwork, which can presumably be traced back to his experiences in his mother's hat store.

Schwarze Wolke (Black Cloud)
This work from Königs' private collection is an example of how Goller creates an intimate insight into his private life with his reduced color palette and his own formal language. His typical ornaments, which do not follow any overarching structure, together with the characteristic borders, frame the scene of a dark cloud over a stylized forest. The strongly flattened pictorial space, which deprives the viewer of any possibility of spatial orientation, has an immersive effect and the style lends the work a rhythm that inevitably appeals to the viewer on an emotional level.