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| Götz, Karl Otto | | | (*) 22. 02.1914 in Aachen | | (x) |
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CLAUDIA BÜTTNER, GÖTZ K.O., Grove Art Online, (Oxford University Press, Accessed 12.03.2005)
German painter, photographer, film maker, draughtsman, printmaker, writer and teacher. From 1932 to 1933 he attended the Webe- und Kunstgewerbeschule in Aachen. Inspired by Picasso, Gris, Klee and the Expressionists, Götz reduced the figures in his painting to minimal linear outlines from 1933, as a result of which he was prohibited from painting and exhibiting from 1935 to 1936. During his military service from 1936 to 1938 he experimented with spray painting, overpainted photograms (of his wife), photograms (produced by laying objects on photographic paper exposed to light) and abstract cine-films. In 1938 he settled in Wurzen, Saxony, and from 1938 to 1939 attended the Kunstakademie in Dresden where he began to concentrate on abstract works, using a mixture of organic and geometric elements. In 1940 he moved to Dresden, where his friends included Will Grohmann and Otto Dix. He served in the German army in Norway from 1941 to 1945. During this period he studied Surrealism, corresponded with Willi Baumeister and composed his Fakturenfibel (‘Introductory primer’; 1945; artist’s col., see 1984 exh. cat., p. 143), which presents, in ink sketches, a systematic alphabet of forms compiled of individual elements and their compound variations; after World War II he produced accompanying woodcuts (1943–5; artist’s col., see 1984 exh. cat., p. 143).
Alongside works in tempera and gouache, Götz made particular use of monotype from 1946. In the same year he began experimenting with solarization, a procedure related to photograms, in which the image is exposed to light during processing to give a halo effect. Following his first one-man shows in 1947–8, he was associated with a number of groups, including Cobra, which he joined in 1948, Quadriga, which he co-founded in 1952, and Zen 49, with whom he made a guest appearance in 1955. From 1952 he became a leading figure in German Art informel and exhibited widely, for example in the Venice Biennale of 1958 and the Documenta 2 exhibition in Kassel in 1959. Götz wrote under the pseudonym of André Tamm, edited the journal Meta from 1948 to 1953, studied information theory intensively for over ten years, published scientific articles and conducted empirical investigations into colour perception.
During this period Götz developed his own technique of gestural painting. Having applied his paint to a wet ground, he would then add or scrape off paint in rapid movements using a number of different tools (e.g. Picture from 8.2, 1953; Saarbrücken, Saarland-Mus.). Götz combined clear compositional elements such as those analysed in his Fakturenfibel with a rapid manner of execution that permitted chance variations and that was influenced by Surrealist theories of automatism. In most of his work, including the gouaches, he created a powerful impression of spatial depth by strong contrasts of black and one or two other colours, such as red, yellow or blue, on a white ground. In the second half of the 1950s Götz executed several series of variations on a particular basic structure: the Spiral Pictures from 1956, featuring two crossing diagonals, with curving brushstrokes and horizontals running in opposite directions; the so-called Submarine Pictures from 1957, in which the canvas is ruled by a dominant horizontal and a vertical descending from above; and the Waterfall Pictures, whose surface is dissected by parallel diagonals, as in Tulva (1957; Münster, Westfäl. Landesmus.). In 1959 he began teaching at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf, Hochschule für Bildende Künste, which he continued to do for the next 20 years.
In the mid-1960s Götz started to produce works executed in three parts, each part painted in a day and then covered up while the next was completed. The dimensions of these rectangular works, which included Födsel (1.74×4.39 m, 1964; Bonn, Rhein. Landesmus.), increased over a period of several years. At this time Götz refined his formal vocabulary into more fluid, spiralling figurations, employing powerful spatial illusionism; in many works of the 1960s and 1970s he used only black and white (e.g. Kelesin, 1975; artist’s col., see 1984 exh. cat., pl. 89). In the 1980s his colours became brighter, and his brushstrokes smaller and more intricate.
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