Fred Thieler

Acquisition: Reinhard Ernst Collection, Galerie Maulberger, Munich, 2009

Solo exhibitions:
2014
‘Fred Thieler. Malerei’, Museum Küppersmühle, Duisburg
1988
‘Fred Thieler’, Kunstkreis im Rolf Flemes Haus, Hameln
1986
‘Fred Thieler, Arbeiten von 1940–1986’, Akademie der Künste, Berlin; Saarland Museum, Moderne Galerie, Saarbrücken
1974
‘Fred Thieler’, Deutsche Oper, Berlin

In his early representational work beginning in 1942, Fred Thieler was initially concerned with conventional subjects. His plan to study medicine fell through after only a few semesters in 1942 because of his mother’s Jewish background. Thieler began to study painting at the painting school founded by Hans Hoffmann in Munich instead. After initially painting representational figurative portraits and landscapes, he radically broke with his previous style in the 1950s and from then on experimented with gestural-dynamic worlds of colour, which identify him as one of the main representatives of German Informel.

In the process, he developed different procedures, from spatula techniques to pouring paint onto canvases that he had previously placed on the floor. This led him to combine different types of paint that either repelled each other or mixed. In the mid-1960s, the process of collage and décollage opened up a new approach to painting for him: ‘[Since] the paint spread almost uncontrollably by pouring it on the canvas […] about 1964, the incorporation of collages [began], that is, not of pre-painted pieces, because these collages are […] either pure white paper or pure canvas, which was only placed in pieces beforehand on the ground canvas – and thus influenced the flow of the paint in a particular way […]. The collage elements then interrupted the free flow of the paint.’ Thieler expanded upon the technique by again pouring paint over pasted shapes, ‘glueing’ the pieces of paper or fabric to the canvas. He also maltreated the canvas by folding, squeezing and décollaging pieces of paper which had already been integrated. When Thieler says that ‘actually the picture dictates the process of painting’ [2], you get a better idea of how open the course of the paint was despite the artist’s actions and reactions.

Until the 1980s, his large canvases were such that he could move them himself. They were light canvases which he could easily manage to hang on nails in his studio by himself. He took to dividing up paintings which were larger than four metres broad into separate pieces which then often formed diptychs or triptychs, for example, Triptychon 73. Klappbild, ungleich with the folding right half of the picture, is a special piece, representing Fred Thieler’s largest continuous canvas up to that time.

[1] Fred Thieler. Monograph and catalogue raisonné. Pictures from 1942–1993, ed. by Andrea Firmenich and Jörg Merkert, Cologne 1995, p. 15.
[2] Ibid.