(Krefeld 1924–2003)
Verweißung, 1976, signed, dated Zangs 1976, white colour (acrylic) on brown wrapping paper, 99 x 212.5 cm, framed

Certificate:
Emmy de Martelaere, Archiv Herbert Zangs, Paris 23.1.2016. The work is registered in the archive with no 2144.

Provenance:
Galerie Zeitkunst, Kitzbühel

For Herbert Zangs, painting is the immediate expression of his vehement enthusiasm for and great curiosity about life. This curiosity makes him into a semi-nomad, who directly after World War II hitch-hikes through Germany and already in the early 1950s travels to Paris, as one of the first German artists after the war, at the invitation of the gallerist Dina Vierny. His enthusiasm and inquisitiveness also lead to the fact that his work makes an impression, particularly in the early 1950s, of heterogeneous richness. With figurative painting, which he practiced since his student days at the Düsseldorf Academy of Art, he supported his livelihood.

The novelty of the abstract works of Herbert Zangs, as also in the work of the artists of the ZERO group, is not exclusively to be found in their artistic composition, but instead it demands a new way of seeing and thinking. The colour white that plays a significant role in his abstract works of the ‘50s and then again in the ‘70s particularly emphasises the materiality of, amongst other things, the collages or assemblages of found pieces and excites the imagination of the viewer. Only for a short time did Zangs act, in the sense of „action painting“, in producing the white paintings, whereby he gesturally applied the white paint on the underpaint in drops, sprays, or blobs. He quickly returned to the serial sequence and gesturally screened order of his “Verweißungen”, which he showed publicly for the first time in 1956. Herbert Zangs preferred to live, to travel, and to retreat for many months a year annually to his house in Cucuron in southern France, rather than to take up a position with or against ZERO, Informel, Nouveau Réalisme or other artistic currents. With his „Verweißungen“, monochrome or polychrome material collages and his serial works, he is equally a pioneer of German Informel, as well as anticipating the basic premises of ZERO with these works. His comment, to the question of a journalist regarding what is most important for him, is „life, for life is movement and everything else....“ The obscurity into which Herbert Zangs for many decades fell can be attributed to himself. Zangs preferred to live and travel instead of occupying himself intensively with the sale of his paintings.
In 1970, one of his drop-paintings from 1954 aroused the interest of Adolf Luther in the Kaiser-Wilhelm-Museum in Krefeld. The upheavals in the art scene in the 1960s also resulted in Herbert Zangs’ early work, which Adolf Luther had discovered in a cellar in Krefeld after doing some research, being met with lively interest in the art world. For Zangs himself, the encounter with his own early work was a decisive turning point; he built on his „Verweißungen“ and continued his work following the path of the early material pictures. The „works after the Seventies charm the internal tension of the early work out of them into dance-like, playful and unbridled activity which is less and less connected to the material but instead only uses it for free, actionistic gesture. The works of the Fifties were those of an early pioneer. In the Seventies the ground was prepared, the rules of panel painting were overcome. Now the artistic processes could spread out unhindered and with great, convincing spontaneity into the broad fields of experimentation.“

Erich Franz, Herbert Zangs: Bild als Aktion, in Emmy de Martelaere, Herbert Zangs, Cahier d‘Archives Tome I Fascicule no 1, Paris 2004, p. 35

„Art is total freedom (...) It is like a child that one allows to grow as its own personality in the world, so that it can develop in freedom, without hanging on to its mother’s apron-strings.“
Herbert Zangs in: Thomas Weber, Herbert Zangs, Düsseldorf 1997, p. 175