Farbige Einladungskarte 1922

This intriguing card was made by Adolf Hölzel using coloured pencils. It feels like he’s working from the inside out, trying to grasp something, maybe some feeling or sensation, by surrounding it with colour. The texture is amazing, it is possible to see the grain of the paper coming through the coloured pencil. The heavy black lines force all the colours to be separate, but they all vibrate against each other, like some kind of weird music. Look at the shape in the upper left, like a head with a hole in it. What does it mean? I think Hölzel is interested in something in between representation and abstraction. Hölzel was a teacher, and his work reminds me of the paintings of his student, Johannes Itten, who took these ideas about abstraction even further. Art is like this; it's a conversation between people, a way of working through ideas that has no fixed meaning, no final answer.