Public acquisition
Nachbarschaft der Farben 20.11.96 (die toten Augen 3), 1996
The Museum of Grenoble is the first museum in France to have hosted a solo exhibition of Helmut Federle's works in 1989. It keeps one of his major paintings entitled MacArthur Park, 1987 in its collection. These two drawings by Helmut Federle are a great addition to the collection of the museum particularly well known for Modernist abstract art.
In his essay 'Scratching Away the Surface', Robert Storr writes that Helmut Federle's drawings such as Landschaft mit Kreis und Doppelkreuz, 1978 'bring Constructivism to mind but render those associations less technological than archeological.' (In Helmut Federle American Songline, Hanje Cantz, 2013)
Federle worked on the series of Nachbarschaft der Farben between July 1994 and the end of 1996. In this series, Federle deliberately focused on a specific balance of each sheet, created with a multitude of coloured lines aligned parallel to the edges of the paper, which intersect at right angles inside the sheet. This all over without hierarchies lives from small deviations in the realisation, but above all from the colours of the pens used, which unexpectedly and surprisingly bring up quite worldly things, which the dedications introduced on certain days suggest, but these references are of a private nature and remain as such in the background. The title of this specific drawing discretely refers to the pain of the artist whose father lost an eye around that time. With their precise dates, the drawings of this series can be understood as a kind of diary.
