Ernst Wilhelm Nay (1902-1968)

Created just one year before he developed his renowned “Augenbilder” series of the early 1960s, Ernst Wilhelm Nay’s Ice Blue marks a pivotal moment of the artist’s mature oeuvre. The gestural brushstrokes which superimpose vivid color planes, bright blues with shimmering azure, ethereal light blue with iridescent white contrasted with brushes of black, make Ice Blue an energetic and hypnotic composition. The artist described his method: ‘If I set a coloured dot on an empty surface, an astonishing number of tensions were created. If I spread out the dot, the tensions increased. A second such disc, a third, a fourth - all the same size, already created a highly complicated formal relation. A number of colours also emerged, if I made each disc a different colour. They could be regarded as a chromatic sequence. The spaces between created forms and these could be developed quite mechanically with the same colours in a specific alternation, creating a corrugated surface so that interlinking resulted… This way of experimenting with a pictorial whole enabled endless variations’ (E. W. Nay, quoted in Nay Retrospektive, exh. cat., Josef Haubrich Kunsthalle, Cologne, 1991, p. 36).