Peter Brüning

Untitled (Nr.42), 1962

Peter Brüning’s works in the Mercedes-Benz Art Collection date from 1955 and 1962 and mark a ten-year phase in his work that identifies Brüning as an outstanding exponent of German Informel art. By emphasizing color as a material and substance of natural forces, he develops a gestural, nervous brush-language that seems to convey the subtlest of emotional and spiritual resonances. “The psychogram as a means of writing down psychological events, calligraphy derived from Eastern Asian sources, occidental painting’s discovery of the sign, all this is part of a tradition that has already become historical. It should not be followed blindly, but for me it is important to distil ‘technique’ from it, and not something like ‘style’.” (P.B.) Direct painterly action, which also reached Europe via Pollock’s Action Painting, defines Brüning’s art on paper and canvas. Starting from expressively tachist and lyrically abstract pictorial composition, he increasingly succeeds in creating painting based on free gestural signs defining, as he puts it himself, an ‘elastic space’.