Günter Fruhtrunk (1923-1982) - Composition (1977)

Günter Fruhtrunk: Composition — from La Lune en Rodage III (1977)

A silkscreen print on cardboard, 28 × 28 cm, published by Edition Panderma, Basel, in 1977. From an edition of 230; this is an unnumbered copy (65 hors-commerce copies were likewise unnumbered). Signed in pencil on the reverse. In mint archival condition. Without frame.

This sheet belongs to one of the most remarkable publishing projects of the post-war avant-garde. La Lune en Rodage was a portable collection of modern and contemporary art conceived and published by the collector and editor Carl Laszlo, issued in three volumes in 1960, 1965 and 1977 and containing in total some 180 works that together trace the artistic avant-garde from the 1950s to the 1970s. Laszlo gathered contributions from leading artists of the period — among them Lucio Fontana, Yves Klein, Piero Manzoni, Andy Warhol, Enrico Castellani and Michelangelo Pistoletto — who frequently contributed pieces marking a turning point in their work. Castellani's contribution, for example, is his first documented graphic work, and Manzoni's Achrome multiple is the only one the artist produced. To hold a sheet from this series is to hold a page from a genuine anthology of twentieth-century art.
Günter Fruhtrunk (1923–1982) was a German painter and printmaker, a leading figure of geometric abstraction whose work is closely related to Op Art. He studied architecture at the Technische Hochschule in Munich before turning to painting, studying privately from 1945 under the painter and printmaker William Straube, himself a pupil of Hölzel and Matisse. In 1954 a scholarship from the Land Baden-Württemberg and the French government took him to Paris, where he worked in the studios of Léger and Arp; he lived and worked mainly in France through the 1960s. He received the Prix Jean Arp in Cologne in 1961 and the silver medal of the Prix d'Europe at Ostend in 1966, took part in the 4th documenta and the 34th Venice Biennale in 1968, and from 1967 taught at the Munich Academy of Fine Arts. Fruhtrunk transformed the ideas of Constructivism into a colourful, rhythmic pictorial world, building a dynamic language of vector-like diagonal lines arranged in strict rhythm according to their alternating colours.

Beyond the gallery and the museum, Fruhtrunk created one of the most widely seen works of concrete art in Germany: the blue-and-white striped design of the Aldi Nord shopping bag, conceived in 1970 and reproduced many millions of times over nearly five decades — a geometric composition that carried his visual language into everyday life on a scale few artworks ever reach.

Provenance:
Edition Panderma, Carl Laszlo, Basel
Galerie von Bartha, Basel
Private collection, Basel