After the Second World War, Ernst Wilhelm Nay, like many artists of his generation, was confronted with the challenges of a new beginning. The destruction and reconstruction of Europe, the confrontation with the German National Socialist past, and the search for new forms of expression in a changing world had a decisive influence on his artistic output. Nay found precisely that when he moved to Cologne in 1951 and, amidst the rubble and ruins of one of the most destroyed cities in Germany, found a completely new attitude to life in the dynamics of reconstruction: Complete freedom, which he immediately began to express in his work.
The work on his manifesto-like text from 1955, “Vom Gestaltwert der Farbe” (On the formative value of colour), heralded the start of what is probably the artist’s best-known and longest-running series of works, the “Scheibenbilder”. Large, round colour fields stretch across the background and demonstrate Nay’s fascination with the pure power of colour. In this work, “Dominant Rot” from 1962, the “Scheibenbilder” are fully developed and elaborated. Blue, red, yellow and green colours are applied with opulent gestures, sometimes interwoven and elsewhere separated by black contours. The contrasts structure the picture, while all other formal schemes are deliberately left behind by the artist. The transition from this phase to his late work in the 1960s can already be seen in “Dominant Rot” through the selective breaking up of the forms of the panes and the deliberate insertion of subtle spatial and colour modulations.