Thomas Ring (1892-1983) - Construction

Thomas Ring: Construction (composition dated 1921), Edition Panderma, Basel

A signed woodcut by Thomas Ring, an artist of the Der Sturm circle around Herwarth Walden — the gallery and journal at the centre of German Expressionism and the European avant-garde in 1910s–1920s Berlin. Construction belongs to Ring's most significant artistic phase: dated 1921, it is a purely abstract, constructive composition from the very years in which his work was shown at the Sturm gallery. The title names the principle — geometric form assembled as autonomous structure, in step with the international constructive current of the early 1920s.Ring trained from 1913 in the graphics class of Emil Orlik in Berlin, alongside fellow students who would become major figures of Weimar modernism, among them George Grosz and Hannah Höch. In the summer of 1920 the Sturm gallery devoted part of its 88th exhibition to thirty-four of his works, and he showed in two further Sturm exhibitions as well as in several of the Große Berliner Kunstausstellungen of the 1920s. For a brief period he was associated with the Novembergruppe and maintained contact with the Weimar Bauhaus circle. His painted and graphic oeuvre is documented in a catalogue raisonné (I. Skiebe, Thomas Ring, ein Maler aus dem Umkreis des "Sturm", 1988).

The composition dates from 1921; this sheet is a later impression issued by Edition Panderma (Carl Laszlo) in Basel, hand-signed by the artist.
Title: Construction
Composition: dated 1921 (this impression a later Edition Panderma printing) [see note]
Technique: Woodcut on paper [see note]
Edition: Total edition of 230; 65 hors-commerce copies issued unnumbered. This is an unnumbered hors-commerce copy.
Signature: Hand-signed
Dimensions: 28 × 27.5 cm, mounted on 32 × 32 cm card
Condition: From the archive, minor signs of use

Publisher: Edition Panderma (Carl Laszlo), Basel
Provenance: Edition Panderma (Carl Laszlo), Basel — Galerie von Bartha, Basel — Private collection, Basel

Thomas Ring (1892 Nuremberg – 1983 Schärding, Austria) was a German painter, poet and writer, and a member of the Der Sturm circle in Berlin. After studying under Emil Orlik, he emerged in the early 1920s as a painter and graphic artist within the Expressionist and constructive avant-garde, before he and his wife, the artist Gertrud Ring, left Germany for Austria in 1932. In later life Ring became the foremost figure of "revised," psychologically oriented astrology in the German-speaking world, the author of the four-volume Astrologische Menschenkunde — a second career that has somewhat overshadowed his standing as a Sturm-era artist.