Leere c. 1921

Karl Wiener made this watercolor called "Leere," which means "emptiness" in German, sometime between 1901 and 1949. Look at how he's divided the paper into two fields of color, a lighter and a darker blue. The way the colors softly blend into each other, it's like watching the sky meet the sea, a simple but profound kind of nothingness. What strikes me is the handmade border he’s given the work. It's like a stitched edge, like he's carefully enclosing this emptiness, framing it, holding it together. These aren't perfect lines, but a series of short, deliberate marks, almost like he's sewing the image onto the paper. The stitching makes me think of Agnes Martin and her subtle grid paintings. Both artists find a lot of meaning in what seems like very little. It's this kind of quiet attention to detail, this embracing of simplicity, that makes "Leere" so resonant. It reminds us that sometimes, the most powerful statements are the ones that whisper.