Lot 380 | Rot

LAUSEN, UWE
1941 Stuttgart - 1970 Beilstein

Title: Rot.
Date: 1963.
Technique: Oil on two canvases separated by a strip.
Measurement: 171,5 x 101,5cm.
Notation: Inscribed, signed and dated. verso on the canvas: Lausen 63. Titled, dated and inscribed verso on the canvas overlap: Rot 63 Rot 62.
Frame/Pedestal: artists slats.


Provenance:
- Galerie Friedrich, Munich

Exhibitions:
- Galerie Margarete Lauter, Mannheim 1964/1965
- Collection Murken, Bonn 1988
- Galerie der Stadt Sindelfingen, 1992

Literature:
- Niggl, Selima (ed.): Uwe Lausen - Werkverzeichnis der Gemälde 1961-1969, Bremen 2010, cat. rais. no. 1964/17, with ill.
- Gollek, Rosel: Uwe Lausen - Bilder, Zeichnungen, Texte 1960-1970, Munich 1984, ill. p. 12
- Bratke, Elke: Sammlung Murken - Zeitgenössische Malerei und Plastik, Bonn 1988, cat. no. 49
- Galerie der Stadt Sindelfingen (ed.): Menschenbilder - Die Sammlung Murken, cat. no. 108
- Hollein, Max (ed.): Uwe Lausen - Ende schön alles schön, Bremen 2010, ill. p. 20

Uwe Lausen already finds his first access to art as a schoolboy. After graduating from high school, he moved to Tübingen to study law and philosophy. He broke off his studies, not least to devote himself more to his artistic interests, and moved to Munich at the age of 19. As part of the artists' group SPUR, Lausen first created paintings and graphic art there. Lausen's excessive drug consumption, psychological problems and the failure of his marriage dragged the young artist into a deep emotional hole. In 1970, just nine years after the beginning of his artistic career, Lausen took his own life after a restless year without permanent residence in his parents' house.
Lausen's work "Red" was created in 1963 at a time when Lausen was just beginning his artistic career. What has been part of Lausen's fixed pictorial programme since the mid-sixties at the latest is already evident here. The title of the work "Red", for example, makes it clear that reduction to colour contrasts is the artist's central theme. The completely unconnected levels of action are also characteristic. In the present work this is emphasized by the division of the canvas by a wooden strip. The canvases show contrasting motifs. The upper canvas, which appears flat, almost monochrome, is contrasted by Lausen's abstract motif in the lower canvas. In this pictorial composition, Lausen's joy of experimentation becomes clear, especially at the beginning of his career. However, the motivic isolation that Lausen pursues in his pictorial composition shows not only compositional sophistication. It also shows how his own psychological situation permeates the composition of his paintings, thus offering the viewer a glimpse into the tortured soul of the artist even 50 years after his death.