Early Pictures
Born in Berlin in 1902, Ernst Wilhelm Nay grew up in one of the liveliest art centres in Europe. He made his first attempts at painting while still at school. However, only after abandoning an apprenticeship in the book trade and various odd jobs did the young Nay make an effort to train as an artist: in 1924, equipped with three of his paintings, including the Portrait of Franz Reuter, he presented himself to the painter Karl Hofer at Berlin University of the Arts. Hofer, convinced of Nay’s talent, not only arranged for his first participation in an exhibition, at the Prussian Academy in Berlin, but also admitted him to his painting class and further supported him.

Some of Nay’s works from this period, with their closeness to nature and earthy tonality, show a stylistic proximity to his teacher’s work as well as to models in art history. Whereas others already reveal that Nay’s gaze was directed towards the latest artistic developments and thus towards France. The many galleries in Berlin offered him the opportunity to study art of the Avantgarde in the original. The bold use of colour in his Portrait of Franz Reuter, for instance, seems to have been inspired by the work of Henri Matisse, while Landscape with Sand Hills suggests an engagement with the Cubists’ conception of space. Directly after completing his studies under Hofer in 1928, Nay set off on a four-week trip to Paris, the centre of modern art.

Dune, Fishermen and Lofoten Pictures
Around 1932, Nay displayed a growing interest in the complex relationships between humans and the world. In his art, he wanted to make visible the cosmic connections – the “mythical bond” – underlying the outer appearance of things. Initially, he painted some abstracted animal pictures in which he transposed the harmony among creatures and nature into a mesh-like system of planes and lines. When, around 1935, he first encountered the original life of the fishermen at the Baltic Sea, the focus of his art shifted toward the human being. Nay expressed the human’s embeddedness in the dynamics of heaven and earth, of storm and sea, through a powerful rhythm of colours. Colours became increasingly significant for his painting – they were the foundation from which forms emerged.

When the National Socialists seized power in 1933, hard times began for many artists in Germany. Nay too was temporarily banned from exhibiting and experienced first defamations. However, as a member of the Reich Chamber of Fine Arts, he received painting materials and subsidies. With support from the Lübeck museum director Carl Georg Heise and the painter Edvard Munch he was able to make his first trip to the Norwegian Lofoten Islands in 1937. Here Nay experienced more vividly than ever the interconnectedness of mankind with nature. In his paintings, he reduced the human figure almost to a mere sign of colour: merging into the crystalline forms of the rocky surroundings, it coalesces with them into one great whole.

France and Hekate Pictures
In December 1939, Nay began his military service. Initially stationed as a soldier in Poland and southern France, he was rarely able to work artistically; it was only as a cartographer in Le Mans that he gained more freedom. He made German and French contacts, including an acquaintance with the amateur artist Pierre Térouanne, who let him use his studio with a library and garden and provided him with painting materials. As a result, pictures of lush landscapes with figures turned toward each other emerged. Nay now deepened his knowledge of Cubism. Similar to Pablo Picasso, for instance, he broke up bodies into their individual parts in his works and reassembled them on the pictorial plane.

Discharged from the army in May 1945, Nay moved to Hofheim am Taunus upon invitation of the art dealer Hanna Bekker. The artist now applied the paint thickly and with agitated brushstrokes, lending his depictions great liveliness. He was intensely preoccupied with a present day between destruction and new beginnings, finding inspiration for this in the Bible and the myths of Greek antiquity. In his mysterious Hekate Pictures (named after the goddess of magic) he rendered situations of transformation as well as an idyllic co-existence with nature. With the motif of the source he referred to the origin of water, but also of culture and civilisation.

Public interest in Nay’s art grew rapidly: in 1947 he had several solo exhibitions in Germany, and in 1948 he was represented at the Venice Biennale for the first time.

Fugal and Rhythmic Pictures
With the Hekate Pictures, Ernst Wilhelm Nay had laid an important foundation for his further work. Only a few years later, however, he reconsidered his pictorial means. In the Fugal Pictures developed since 1949, the coloured planes now took on sharper contours and gained in luminosity. Nay found inspiration in the fugue, a form of musical composition in which different voices sound at varying intervals and yet together: by interlacing, repeating or inverting areas of colour, he created dynamic bands and rhythmic sweeps in his pictures. Often circling around black dots, the images visually create movement. Though, here, the subject matter can hardly be grasped anymore, last reminders of figures remain present.

In 1951 Nay moved to Cologne. The vibrancy of the big city was reflected in the Rhythmic Pictures, his first truly abstract works. The interplay of form, line and colour now appeared freer, even more dynamic – inspired by works of New Music. Sometimes the former strict contours became blurred and frayed, but Nay soon returned to a more systematic methodology. In the autumn of 1953, he also took on a three-month teaching position at the Landeskunstschule Hamburg: if the painter had initially only formulated principles of working for himself, he now based his teaching on them. In 1955, he published his art-theoretical writing Vom Gestaltwert der Farbe (On the Value of Colour).

Disc Pictures, Eye Pictures and Late Pictures
Nay was fascinated with all sciences, especially mathematics and physics. Albert Einstein had proven that space, time and matter were not fixed but variable values. There thus no longer existed a single, correct view of the world, but many possible points of view. Nay was also keen on depicting spatial relationships and discovered the motif of the disc for himself. In the 1950s, he designed numerous pictures reminiscent of outer space, based on overlaid discs. Contrasts of dark-light or warm-cold colours caused them to vibrate visually. They seemed to swirl, dissolve or push beyond the edges. Nay laid hatchings and pointed ovals over his circles and, in 1963/64, developed images in which huge eyes appear like magical signs. Three Eye Pictures attached to the ceiling triggered a controversy about Nay at the documenta III in Kassel in 1964. a younger art generation rejected his painting as meaningless decoration. Whereas in the US, especially in New York, his works were appreciated and regularly exhibited.

From 1965 onwards, Nay simplified his painting even further: relying on a few intense colours and curved forms, he composed pictures built on vertically running fields. His extensive travels around the world inspired him to create calm, almost meditative works. Though non-representational, they still recall bodies, limbs, hands or eyes. To the last, Nay kept his art oscillating between figure and abstraction.