Diet Sayler (b. 1939)

Combining sensuality with rational sensibility, Fünf Linien bears testiment to Diet Sayler’s endeavour to breath life into the sterile rigours of Constructivism. Using geometric language as his means of artistic expression, Sayler harnesses the formal strength and precision of bold colour and simple abstract structures, recognising their expressive potential. Reinvigerating conceptual dictates, Sayler allows a substantial element of chance and subjectivity to infiltrate his work, creating a rhythmic purity that enlivens flat, two-dimension surfaces into lyrical expressions of unfetted freedom. Throughout his oeuvre, Sayler maintained that his art is 'free from political rules, religious canons, but also without artistic ideology', and is above all 'the affirmation of subjectivity' ( D. Sayler, quoted in Diet Sayler - Painting does not lie, Messina 2009, p. 57). Rooted in geometirc abstraction celebrated by Kazimir Malevich and Piet Mondrian on the one hand, distancing himself from academic rationalism on the other, Sayler is at the forefront of Constructivism, liberating the genre from the arbitrary constraints of objectivism. As the artist explains 'Principle if form. Colour is freedom. Chance is the moment' (D. Sayler quoted in Mel Gooding, Diet Sayler, London 1999).