Gunter Christmann

The artist
Niagara Galleries, Melbourne
Private collection, Melbourne; purchased from the above

Blue Chip VIII: The collector's exhibition, 7 March - 1 April 2006, Niagara Galleries, Melbourne, cat. 32 (label on reverse)

Blue Chip VIII: The collector's exhibition, Melbourne: Niagara Galleries, 2006 (illus.)

No tears, scratches or scuffs. Very good condition for size and age.
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From hard-edge beginnings in the mid 1960s Gunter Christmann extended his experiments with colour into a more pointillist mode, of spots and spatters of acrylic paint flicked onto canvases laid on the floor. It is by no means a unique language – Seurat, Signac and the Neo-Impressionists pioneered dotting in the 1880s, Post-Painterly Abstractionists in America such as Jules Olitski pursued similar effects with airbrush and spray gun, while in Australia the mosaic-veils of Ralph Balson are an obvious precedent. However, it is a system which Christmann made very much his own in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Through these weightless, open fields he was able to conduct his pictorial experiments: most obviously in terms of colour theory, of the complimentary and simultaneous contrast of colours, but also with regard to the division of space within the picture plane, and even to the shaping of the canvas.

The present work is from 1973, when the spatter paintings had achieved their settled, mature form: vertical rectangles of all-over chromatic effervescence, or as Elwyn Lynn once put it, 'trembling palpitation',¹ with the merest shift or shadow of chromatic or tonal intensity along their edges. Lenz is a subtle, lyrical poem of the merest shift or shadow of chromatic or tonal intensity along their edges. Lenz is a subtle, ambiguous emanation of sunrise or sunset, a lyrical poem of gold, rose and blue (integrated by gravitational black). In its upper register the yellow centre bleeds into quite clearly defined pink framing edges at top and sides. But as the eye moves downwards, the work's chromatic focus shifts to the opposite side of the colour wheel, and both outside 'frame' and centre 'panel' dissolve into a cornflower or sky blue field extending right across the width of the bottom of the canvas.

In the end, however, the painting is much more than an art-theoretical demonstration piece, or a chromo-technical machine. It is much more than the sum of its parts; it is (to use a favourite 1970s word) a gestalt. Lenz actually absorbs, contains and communicates emotional response. In Elwyn Lynn's words, 'the feelings embodied in (Christmann's) work are of the "not quite" or "kinship" order: they are not quite about joyousness, melancholy, release, hesitancy or shyness; they are akin to expansive ease or cautious confrontation; they embody notions of a veiled life of oblique and subtle suggestions and of a tremulous untroubled certainty.'²

1.  Elwyn Lynn, 'Gunter Christmann', Art and Australia, vol. 10 no. 3, January 1973, p. 247
2.  ibid., p. 250