Hermann Bartels

Hermann Bartels transformed painting from a two-dimensional surface into a three-dimensional form. 

In the 1950s, Bartels worked with thickly applied layers of paint and expressive, intuitive brushstrokes. Beginning in the 1960s, he developed a “strip overlay” technique where he placed colored strips of canvas parallel to one another on white-primed surfaces. With this method, Bartels transformed the canvas into a relief that better responded to the interplay of light and shadow. In addition to his exploration of the three-dimensional pictorial object, color played a decisive role for Bartels—whether in his gestural-abstract and monochromatic paintings or in his variable parallel montages, in which he constructed strip- canvases into a single work.