The PIASA house is organising a modern and contemporary art sale on Wednesday 25 November at 6 pm. This sale brings together 127 lots, including a work by the German-Mexican artist Mathias Goeritz (1915-1990).
Mathias Goeritz, who was at the same time a painter, sculptor and architect, was fascinated by gold, considered both as a precious metal used for trade and as the result of an alchemical transmutation.
He graduated with a doctorate in philosophy and art history in Berlin in 1937, and in his youth was influenced by the avant-garde, both Dada and the Bauhaus. After travelling in Europe, Goeritz settled in Spain in Santillana del Mar, where he was one of the founders in 1948 of the Altamira School, which claimed the freedom to create new forms.
In 1952 he designed a golden altar for the chapel of the Capuchin convent with the architect Luis Barragan. A few years later, in Mexico, where he spent most of his life, Goeritz produced a series of reliefs in gilded wood and metal which combined elements of geometry with decorative motifs spread over the entire surface.
Mathias Goeritz (1915-1990)
Untitled
Estimate : 20000 / 30000 €
These works, as Georges Roque pointed out in an essay, are to be compared with Yves Klein's Monogold as well as with the materialist monochromes of the Zero group. Goeritz's reliefs in gilded wood and metal are also, in reference to medieval art, an expression of the need to combine aesthetic experience with "spiritual elevation".
