Karl Otto Götz

Most people today probably associate the squeegee as a painting tool with the German powerhouse Gerhard Richter, and not with his (and Sigmar Polke’s) influential but less well-known professor at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf, Karl Otto Götz. But for anyone who gets to see Götz’s current retrospective—mounted on the occasion of his hundredth birthday—that just might just change. The exhibition, comprised of prints, paintings, and drawings dating from 1934 to 2010, opens with a brief but mesmerizing film excerpt of Götz in action, circa 1964. Crouching over an unstretched canvas on the floor, Götz quickly draws a large brush dipped in black paint across its surface, creating a fluid, almost calligraphic squiggle. Without a moment’s hesitation, Götz then grabs his squeegee and cuts into the still-wet paint, rapidly traversing the line to create swirling monochromatic ribbons, pools of pigment with delicate bleeding edges, and areas of finely speckled paint that look like an ink wash crossed with aquatint. He repeats the process until he’s satisfied with the final composition, which is invariably an explosive whirl of viscous brushstrokes (sometimes in Technicolor, though most strikingly in black and white) and squeegeed passages of blank canvas, as in Trefang, 1963, and Giverny VII, 1988.

Götz developed his distinctive brand of lyrical abstraction following a period of derivative style-hopping, with hints of Miró, Picasso, and Pollock especially evident in the early works on view here. What is most surprising about his mature paintings is the fact that their seeming haphazardness and intensity of movement belie Götz’s actual process, which often entails preparatory sketches, a few of which are shown alongside completed paintings. The sketches and the film of Götz at work, far from demystifying the artist’s craft, demonstrate that his paintings, much like Pollock’s, are a magical convergence of method and chaos, discipline and spontaneity, worthy of greater recognition among his postwar peers.