Forest, 1925

Covering the entire vertical picture area in warm, rich, modulated colors, Georg Philipp Wörlen (1886–1954) lines up densified vertical stripes in his 1925 painting Forest. Only gradually can they be identified as tree trunks: At the lower edge of the picture plane, intertwining roots anchored in the reddish-brown earth take shape, and in the upper quarter, individual diagonal branch-like cross-limbs fork off from the dense linearity of the parallel trunks. It is not the representational image of a forest, but the phenomenon of the play of light and shadow and the space-defining density of the trunks in a coniferous culture that Wörlen makes the starting point of his formal exploration. The confounding game of serial parallelism and the glazing-induced polychromy create a shimmering atmosphere. In his conceptual approach, the work of the Passau-born artist is reminiscent of ideas of form art and kineticism.

MH, 2021