Picture "Yellow-Violet Sky" (Unique piece)
Picture "Yellow-Violet Sky" (Unique piece)
Quick info
unique piece | monogrammed | watercolour on paper | framed | size 77.5 x 86 cm
Detailed description
Picture "Yellow-Violet Sky" (Unique piece)
Watercolour on paper. Monogrammed. Motif size/sheet size 60 x 70 cm. Size in frame 77.5 x 86 cm as shown.
About Herbert Beck
Herbert Beck (1920-2010) studied at the Kunstgewerbeschule in Leipzig, Germany, after training as a goldsmith. He lived and worked as a freelance artist at Lake Tegernsee and in the Italian municipality of Laigueglia.
His work is characterised by colour: Fascinated by the Expressionists, Beck developed his distinctive watercolour technique over the decades, in which he made the colours seem to glow. For his paintings, he heavily diluted oil paint with turpentine, achieving a glazed, shimmering colouration. In 1984, he suffered a serious illness, probably caused by turpentine poisoning.
After his recovery, he left the field of oil painting and concentrated exclusively on watercolour painting in the following years. During this time, he produced unusually large-format and dense works for this technique.
His works were last exhibited in 2018 at the exhibition "Herbert Beck meets Emil Nolde. Inspiration and Realisation" at the Olaf Gulbransson Museum in Tegernsee.
Paintings with glazing watercolours, that are characterised by their transparency, which let deeper layers and painting surfaces shine through.
Often the paper surface is omitted. This contributes significantly to the effect of the work. The aquarelle painting requires skilful use of colour, as it dries quickly and corrections are almost impossible.
A one-of-a-kind or unique piece is a work of art that has been personally created by the artist. It exists only once due to the type of production (oil painting, watercolours, drawing, etc.).
In addition to the classic unique pieces, there exist the so-called "serial unique pieces". They present a series of works with the same colour, motif and technique, manually prepared by the same artist. The serial unique pieces are rooted in "serial art", a type of modern art, that aims to create an aesthetic effect through series, repetitions and variations of the same objects or themes or a system of constant and variable elements or principles.
In the history of arts, the starting point of this trend was the work "Les Meules" (1890/1891) by Claude Monet, in which for the first time a series was created that went beyond a mere group of works. The other artists, who addressed to the serial art, include Claude Monet, Piet Mondrian and above all Gerhard Richter.