Harald de Bary

works

untitled, 1966-82, 138 x 111 cm, on stretcher frame signed, dated and inscribed "VI 5 - 32 -33"
Colored modulation on brown ground I, 1960, oil, 129 x 113 cm, on stretcher signed, dated and inscribed "VII 12-32-3"
White and light blue,1965, oil on burlap, 40.5 x 32 cm, signed, dated and inscribed "IV 3 8" on stretcher
White and red,1966. 37 x 47cm
untitled, 1969, 132.5 x 90.5 cm, on stretcher frame signed, dated and inscribed "VII 5, 14.) 15.)"
untitled, 1958, 95 x 140 cm, on stretcher signed, dated and inscribed "VII-22-29"
untitled, 1960, 157,5 x 112 cm, on stretcher signed, dated and inscribed "VII 12 - 29 - 31"
untitled, 1967, 39 x 55.5 cm
Abstract figuration in bright colors, 1965, oil, 131 x 109 cm, on stretcher signed, dated and inscribed "VI 13 - 1- 3"
Blue and white, 1964, 132.5 x 90 cm, on stretcher frame signed, dated and inscribed "VII 13 - 25 -30"
White and black-blue, 1966, 47 x 57cm
untitled, 1967, 39 x 61cm

biography

© Harald de Bary © Egbert Polski via www.haralddebary.com

Harald de Bary

Harald de Bary (born 1935 in Frankfurt/Main) belongs to the younger generation of German "Informel" artists. The painter and pastor of the Christian Community Johannes Rath (1910-1973) led the young man, who came from an aristocratic family and grew up in his totally destroyed home town, to abstract painting. After receiving lessons from the member of the "Quadriga" group Heinz Kreutz as a schoolboy in 1954-56 and thus becoming acquainted with one of the centers of German "Informel", he studied in Stuttgart in 1956-60 with Heinrich Wildemann (1904-1964), one of the most important representatives of non-objective painting in post-war Germany. Without ever denying these influences, Harald de Bary detached himself from them after his studies to such an extent that he was able to incorporate them into his own pictorial aesthetic. He developed an extraordinarily broad spectrum of formal means of representation, which can be read as transformations of thematic stimuli. The links to children's pictures, religious themes, the dilapidated and ruinous, evoked not least by found objects, accentuate his work, as do, for example, the reminiscences of his trips to Africa, which were inspired by his mother, the writer and Africa traveler Erica de Bary. With the means of expression of the "Informel", the self-experience became a reflection of the time and the Frankfurt patrician thus became a chronicler who extracted the "spiritual" in the form of the abstract image from psychological presuppositions that have their respective place. The range of sensations evoked extends from the childlike to the ironic, the remote, but also the religious, the dominant and the natural or lovely. The social theme of "structures" is treated with serial creations, which include the many line drawings, but which also address abysmal psychological dimensions as "impact images".

Characterized by extreme immediacy, de Bary's works confront the viewer with the fundamentally unexpected. Among the German representatives of Art Informel, he stands out for the spontaneity of his personal vision and the informality of its formal realization. His work is a form of communication conducted from a standpoint of complete independence, which aims to reach its addressees solely through its formulations, each of which is expressed in a new artistic form according to the will of its creator.

Text: Johann Konrad Eberlein