History often tries to divide artistic creation into phases, to find categories, to draw boundaries and, based on this, to assert hierarchies. All of this may facilitate perception, however, the blurred borders between the catgories refuse to be structured. The works made exactly aling these blurred lines - as is the case with Ernst Wilhelm Nay - are among the most exciting pictorial inventions in his entire oeuvre, as they appear vibrantly new and convey a restless search that, with each completed picture, already bears the spirit of future creations. “Pictures come from pictures,” is a well-known phrase that Nay coined. His works from the 1930s already contain the compositional rigor of his late work. The disk, after which the famous work phase from 1954 onward was named, also had an important compositional function in the 1930s. The same is true for the eye. It is unanimously believed that Nay only conceived the round shape in the 1960s, however, there are numerous works made 20 years prior that already hint at the key future element.

Aurel Scheibler's catalogue raisonné of oil paintings mentions “In Blockformen” (1953) as the third from last work in the series of the “Rhythmic Pictures”, so it might as well be viewed as the first work in the series of the “Disk Pictures” (1954-1962). An amorphous background, typical of his works from the early 1950s, in ochre, black, blue and red is broken up by a dominant white. The white, which seems to radiate from the background of the picture, simultaneously forms another pictorial level and creates depth effect. The real protagonists of the picture, however, are the white, dark blue and light blue disks on the foremost level, which have penetrated the compact color like shooting stars and are spread across the image area likes harbingers of the new phase.

The work reveals even greater significance when looking at its back, as we find a second likewise signed picture there, which might have been created just a little earlier and can be clearly identified as a “Rhythmic Picture”. Just as it is the case with “In Blockformen”, the white breaks through an abstract color surface of red, brown, blue and green. Instead of the disks, there are black line structures with a rhythm reminiscent of the importance of music in the early Cologne years. Like no other work, these two paintings on one canvas offered here represent Nay's transition to the “Disk Pictues”, which would make him one of the most important German artists of the 20th century. [SN]