Edmund Kesting (1892-1970): Spiel der Kreise (1928)

Artist
Edmund Kesting (1892–1970)
 
Title
Spiel der Kreise
 
Medium
Linocut
 
Material
Paper
 
Dimensions
28 x 28 cm
 
Editor
Edition Panderma, Basel
 
Year
1966, published 1977
 
Signature
Signed with estate stamp
 
Provenance
Edition Panderma, Carl Laszlo, Basel
Galerie von Bartha, Basel
Private Collection, Basel
 
Condition / Restauration
Mint archival condition
 
Biography
Edmund Kesting (Dresden 1892 – Birkenwerder 1970) was a German painter, photographer and avant-garde art teacher, one of the most inventive experimental image-makers of German modernism. He studied at the Dresden Academy of Fine Arts under Richard Müller and Otto Gussmann, and from 1919 taught at the progressive private art school Der Weg, opening a Berlin branch in 1927.
 
In 1923 Kesting exhibited at Herwarth Walden's legendary Galerie Der Sturm in Berlin, moving within an avant-garde circle that included Kurt Schwitters, László Moholy-Nagy, El Lissitzky and Alexander Archipenko. He pushed photography into radically new territory — pioneering photograms, solarisation and multiple exposures — and under National Socialism twelve of his works were condemned as "degenerate art" and banned. After 1945 he created the searing photographic cycle Dresdner Totentanz in response to the bombing of Dresden, and from the mid-1950s developed his camera-less "chemical painting".
 
Spiel der Kreise (Play of Circles) reflects the constructive, geometric current that ran through Kesting's work, reducing the composition to the pure interplay of circular forms. Printed from his estate and issued by Carl Laszlo's renowned Edition Panderma in Basel, this linocut bears the artist's estate stamp and distils his lifelong fascination with rhythm, structure and abstract form.