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With his dynamic rotational images, autobinary spatial images and portable visual machines the Swiss artist Alfons Schilling, who has made Vienna his home, occupied a special position in Austrian postwar art. Schilling worked at the interface of art and science, always in search of a new visual perception and reality. Impressed by Abstract Expressionism and Art Informel, he initially oriented himself towards a gestural style of painting. Together with Günter Brus, he tried to break the boundaries of pictorial space and rebel against conventional aesthetics in his spontaneous action paintings. This work is a prime example of this, reminiscent in its formal language and large format of the compositions of Willem de Kooning or Joan Mitchell. When Schilling created this early work in 1961, he wrote: “The possibility of the indefinitely incessant image can only be represented by an excerpt. How can I feel the ‘infinite’ in a picture unless I am denied the possibility of seeing the picture as something complete and finished? The viewer must be deprived of any stopping point (even if it is only at the edge). Only the unstoppable is real painting. There must be no possibility of beginning or ending anywhere in the picture. Those two points in time must lie outside – if only because, by their very nature, they measure out a certain period of time. [...] One must be able to enter my picture from any side and to leave my picture from any side" (Alfons Schilling: Alfons Schilling. Die frühen Bilder [“Alfons Schilling. The early paintings”], Vienna 2008, p. 29).

(Stefan Üner)