(Basel 1934–2013 Vienna)
Untitled, Rotationsbild /spin painting, signed and dated Schilling 62 on the reverse, dispersion on canvas, diameter 215.5 cm, stretched on wooden frame

Alfons Schilling‘s spin painting, over two meters in diameter, was created in Paris 1962 in his studio at 39 Rue de la Glaciere

Provenance:
From the estate of the artist
Private Collection, Vienna

I read Henry Miller and Rimbaud, listened to music by Krenek and Alban Berg, and time, if one could perceive it, spoke of overcoming simultaneity through informalist action. Prachensky painted in red against a city that was still grey from the war; Nitsch, whom I did not know at the time, painted with blood; the flak towers had become architecture; Otto Mauer‘s black shelter was too lyrical for me, too little aggressive in a world urging for change, I wanted my art to be leftist and gauche. At that time, I lived and worked in a two-room basement in Messenhausergasse in the third district and was in a phase where I tried to expand the process and action of painting into space. The agitation was to be spatially shifted in front of the picture surface and seen as such. I envisioned a revolution of the pictorial support, as the retina of the effort, as a casual relic of a specific action, as a plan of energies; the pictorial support, later set in motion, moved in a circle from the autumn of 1961 onwards, in order to throw the last anchor, that of gravity, overboard, then motorised, began to turn faster and faster. On the one hand, this made any intervention more difficult; on the other hand, it meant a dynamisation of the visual process, ultimately expressing itself as an explosion, as planetary centrifugal force, as cosmic form.
Alfons Schilling, 1989