Thomas Ring (1892-1983) - Construction

Thomas Ring: Composition — from the portfolio La Lune en Rodage III

Original work on vergé paper, the motif dated 1921, signed "Thomas Ring." The reduction of the image to an open web of pure line, without mass or modelling, reflects the abstract, constructive current that ran through the Sturm circle in Berlin around 1920, in which Ring formed his pictorial language.

Thomas Ring (Nuremberg 1892 – Schärding 1983) was a German painter, poet and philosopher, and a member of Herwarth Walden's Der Sturm circle in Berlin, where he became known primarily as a painter and poet. From 1911 he trained at the school of the Kunstgewerbemuseum in Berlin, entering the graphic class of Emil Orlik in 1913 alongside fellow students George Grosz, Hannah Höch and Karl Hubbuch. Wounded in the First World War, he met Walden, who published his poems in the journal Der Sturm. His painting developed in close dialogue with Expressionism and the abstract theories of Kandinsky and the Blaue Reiter. Although from the 1920s Ring increasingly devoted himself to his influential work on philosophical astrology, he never abandoned the visual arts; his artistic œuvre is the subject of a scholarly catalogue raisonné (Ingrid Skiebe, Thomas Ring — ein Maler aus dem Umkreis des "Sturm", 1988) and of museum retrospectives in Duisburg (1988) and Bietigheim-Bissingen (1993).


Condition: mint archival condition.

Provenance: Edition Panderma, Carl Laszlo, Basel — Galerie von Bartha, Basel.