Martin Engelman (1924 - 1992) - Lot 39

Martin Engelman (1924 - 1992) Untitled, 1960 Color lithograph N°65/200 59 x 50 cm After art studies in Amsterdam and Maastricht and two years' service in the Dutch navy during the Second World War, Martin Engelman settled in Paris in 1948, becoming assistant to A. M. Cassandre the same year. M. Cassandre the same year. In 1957, he worked for seven years with Darthea Speyer, who directed exhibitions at the American Cultural Center, and decided to devote himself to painting. He had his first solo exhibition in 1960 at the Galerie Jean Giraudoux in Paris. In 1964, he was invited to Kassel to take part in Documenta III, before the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam organized his first solo exhibition in a museum (1965). Like many post-war artists, Engelman took an interest in Surrealism, particularly Max Ernst's dreamlike images, between nightmare and reality. Close to the Cobra movement, which inspired the spontaneity and boldness of his paintings, his references to childlike schematizations, the grotesque and the fantastic are not unrelated to Dubuffet's Art Brut. In the 1960s, Martin Engelman created an ambiguous world inhabited by chimerical, supernatural creatures from increasingly menacing dreams. The more the pictorial space becomes the stage for reflection on events in society (Vietnam, the student revolts of the late 1960s), the more his paintings take on a menacing, serious and sombre tone. A reference to Beckmann's Barque (1926, Feigen Collection, New York), Le Manège (1967) belongs to this pictorial universe of disturbing or strange disarticulated, sexualized and hybrid creatures parading in a scenic space that holds them prisoner. At the end of 1967, Martin Engelman was invited to teach at the Hamburg Academy, and in 1970 he was appointed professor at the Berlin Academy of Fine Arts. Towards the end of the 1960s, not only did his forms harden, but his colors, echoing a world scarred by history, did not conceal the dark, serious character from which he would not distance himself until 1971-1972. Heads, very present in his work, become menacing, and hostile physiognomies stand out, isolated in indefinable spaces. Le Clown (1970), which refers to Beckmann's Self-Portrait as a Clown (1921, Von der Heydt-Museum, Wuppertal), bears witness to his confinement and his reflection on a Germany whose face is now divided in two. Please ask for condition reports before the sale: they are not included in the listing.