It did not snow on 22 November 2016, when Dorotheum’s contemporary art auction took place. Yet Herbert Zangs lent the event a distinctly white quality.
Whitening
Painting was the immediate expression of Herbert Zangs’s unbridled enthusiasm and great curiosity about life, which also made his works impressively heterogeneous. His art is novel not just because of its visual design but because it requires a new way of seeing and thinking. The colour white plays an essential role in Zangs’s abstract works of the 1950s and 1970s. It emphasises the materialness of the collage or assemblage of found objects in a special way and stimulates the observer’s imagination.
Zangs temporarily applied the principles of action painting in creating white pictures, which included dripping, spraying or heaping white paint onto the surface, but soon returned to serial sequences and systematic grids. His “Verweißungen” (“Whitenings”), monochrome or polychrome material collages and serial works make him a pioneer of German informalism and a trailblazer of the basic premise of ZERO.
Herbert Zangs
“Verweißung” (whitening), 1976
white paint (acrylic) on brown wrapping paper, 99 cm x 212.5 cm
price realised €56,250
