Yellow watercolor 3

Joachim Bandau was born in Cologne in 1936. He belongs to an important group of German artists, together with Gerhard Richter, Joseph Beuys, and Imi Knoebel, who came out of the Kunstakademie Du?sseldorf in 1961. In 1966, he is among the founders of the group of artists K66. In 1977, he is exhibited at Documenta 6 in Kassel and in 1986 he receives the Will Grohmann Award from the Berlin Academy of Arts. Joachim Bandau has had numerous solo exhibitions, including shows at the Museum Ludwig (Cologne), Neues Museum (Nu?rnberg), M HKA (Antwerp), SculptureCenter (New York), Hamburger Bahnhof (Berlin), Haus der Kunst (Munich), Städtische Kunsthalle (Mannheim), Fine Art Museum (Budapest), De Young Museum (San Francisco), Palais des Beaux-Arts (Brussels). Bandau’s work is present in many important public collections, such as Centre Pompidou Museum (Paris), Kunstmuseum (Basel), Staatliche Kunstsammlungen (Dresden), and Museum Ludwig (Cologne)… In 2017, he participated to the exhibition Ungestalt at Kunsthalle Basel. He is currently exhibited in the collection of the Center Pompidou.

Joachim Bandau showed several works at Documenta 6 in Kassel in 1977. He was performing inside Kabinen-Mobil. For the first time, Joachim Bandau was “using” by himself one of his famous “mobile sculptures“, imposing polyester structures close to man-machine hybrids, which refer to the human condition and form. There is a contrasting tension between confinement and spatial deployment, with his sculptures’ potential for mobility, forcing the viewer to move around. Since the 1990s, Joachim Bandau has been juxtaposing transparent filters of light-gray watercolor to shape blocks of dark matter, reminiscent of radiograph, but also of Malevitch’s Suprematist compositions. These Black Watercolors suggest incessant motion from within to without, between withdrawal and spatial control. The complexity of perception leads to the ambiguity of the image. Shades of grey watercolor evoke photographic decomposition of movement, as if each were capturing successive movements of one block of color.