The Chromatic Logic of Georg Karl Pfahler

Installation view of "Georg Karl Pfahler: NEW YORK | NEW YORK" at Nino Mier Gallery, SoHo, New York. Photo: Elisabeth Bernstein. Courtesy of the estate of the artist and Nino Mier Gallery.
  

By RAPHY SARKISSIAN | November 24, 2025

Colours are the deeds and sufferings of light.
— Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

In visual perception a color is almost never seen as it really is—as it physically is. This fact makes color the most relative medium in art.
— Josef Albers
 

A pivotal and tightly focused exhibition, Georg Karl Pfahler: New York / New York brings ten paintings and several works on paper executed in the hard-edge style by the German artist to Nino Mier Gallery, revealing the precision and formal rigor that anchor Pfahler’s contribution to postwar abstraction. Rising through the hard-edge movement after World War II, his work pivoted between Bauhaus experimentalism and New York’s emergent formalist abstraction. Developed in parallel with the work of Ellsworth Kelly, Kenneth Noland, and Frank Stella, Pfahler's canvases articulate a geometric and chromatic language that is at once historically grounded and structurally exacting. Rather than merely extending an existing lineage, Pfahler’s paintings disclose how abstraction in the postwar period operated as both a visual proposition and a conceptual framework: an evolving negotiation between phenomenological interrogations of forms and colors, along with the cultural conditions that shaped them. Pushing Seurat’s Pointillist color logic to its opposite extreme, these works nonetheless recall Ogden Rood’s assertion that “breaking one colour in small points through or over another is the most important of all processes in good modern oil and water-colour painting.”[1]

Installation view of "Georg Karl Pfahler: NEW YORK | NEW YORK" at Nino Mier Gallery, SoHo, New York. Photo: Elisabeth Bernstein. Courtesy of the estate of the artist and Nino Mier Gallery. 

Pfahler’s approach to hue constitutes a system that is simultaneously disciplined and daring. This system’s vibrant—almost “joyful”—coloration reveals Matisse-like emanations of color: "hedonistic, sensual and charming," as Alfred H. Barr, Jr. has characterized Matisse's art.[2] Such a treatment of color also recalls the exuberant chromaticism of the German Expressionists—from Die Brücke (The Bridge) to Der Blaue Reiter (The Blue Rider). The circular motif in Pfahler’s work gestures toward, in faint measure, Wassily Kandinsky's Several Circles, No. 323 of the Guggenheim, where the circle operates as a site for abstraction’s primordiality and the psychological weight of history and formal reflection. As Harold Bloom theorizes in The Anxiety of Influence, the production of art entails an intergenerational negotiation driven by the underlying concept of influence and precedent, a dynamic in which the new rigorously inherits, transforms, and contests its precedent. In Pfahler’s work, this negotiation is rendered visible: chromatic boldness and optical precision do not obliterate antecedent forms but stage a sustained, critical dialogue with them, disclosing abstraction as historically embedded and experientially unprecedented.

While the influence of Kelly, Noland, and Stella is undeniable, Pfahler’s work also pulses with a vivacity that bridges the high art discipline and the ephemeral pop culture of its era. The bold geometric patterns here recall 1960s and 70s interiors, where fleeting trends—echoed in the street-to-catwalk transformations of designers like Yves Saint Laurent, Pierre Cardin, and Emilio Pucci, or the sleek glamour of Halston—adorned domestic walls with concentric circles with shifting centers and wave-like vibrations. Against such a backdrop, Pfahler’s canvases assert the enduring authority of painting over transient design.

Georg Karl Pfahler, Metro Mo Nr. 1, 1966-74. Acrylic on canvas, 71 by 63 inches. Photo: Elisabeth Bernstein. Courtesy of the estate of the artist and Nino Mier Gallery.

Within the exhibition’s network of focal points is Metro Mo Nr. I (1966–74), a human-scale canvas dominated by a resonant field of royal purple. Along its four corners, the painted curves form sharply rendered shapes, articulating the rectangle’s geometry while activating the observer’s perceptual engagement. The painting operates at a threshold where neither illusion nor facticity holds absolute sway: color illusively overrides the support’s geometry at the level of gestalt perception. This optical play is anchored by the persistent visibility of the white corners, which assert the objective boundary even as they enable its curvilinear transformation. Within this outer field lies a second, regular rectangular frame in cobalt violet—an interior window that briefly recedes before returning the viewer to the original royal purple on the left side. This inner portal is sharply interrupted by a bright-blue diagonal band running from the upper right to the lower left, bifurcating the innermost rectangle. Along the lower edge of this diagonal cut a bright green triangle sits, firmly anchoring the composition with a decisive chromatic counterpoint. The interlocking sequence of purple, violet, blue, and green establishes a complex system of striking spatial reversals, tightening the painting’s internal structure while intensifying its carefully calibrated tensions. In Pfahler, abstraction offers its autonomous gift: formal stringency betrothed to perceptual drama.

A second painting, Metro-Lux II (1965–74), employs a construct virtually identical to Metro Mo Nr. I apart from its recalibrated color: an outermost deep red, a subtly lighter inner rectangle, a return to the outer red, a diagonal in orange, and a sharply defined sea blue triangle in the lower segment, which together constitute an alternative color set. This repetition foregrounds Pfahler’s ongoing exploration of chromatic relationships within a strictly geometric framework. It is precisely this structural discipline, carried through serial variation, that brings his work into resonance with the philosophy of Piet Mondrian and the De Stijl movement, where pure abstraction and the interplay of vertical and horizontal planes operated as a disciplined method for structuring compositional modalities without precedent in the history of abstraction. By translating this De Stijl principle into dynamic, chromatically daring fields, Pfahler emphasizes the embodied experience of color, demonstrating that abstraction can be both systematic and sensually immediate. In Metro-Lux II, Pfahler performs his own version of Bach’s Piano Concerto No. 5 in F Minor, BWV 1056: II. Largo, translating the sound’s slow, luminous clarity into an optical rhythm of nested chromatic forms that suffuse the canvas with sheer effulgence.

Georg Karl Pfahler, Metro-Lux II, 1965-74. Acrylic on canvas, 71 by 63 inches. Photo: Elisabeth Bernstein. Courtesy of the estate of the artist and Nino Mier Gallery.  

Despite their structural affinity with Mondrian and the De Stijl principles, Pfahler’s Metro Mo Nr. I and Metro-Lux II move away from a strictly non-illusionistic mode of abstraction by introducing dynamic optical play. The carefully calibrated contrasts of hue, together with the viewer’s shifting distance from the canvases, produce effects reminiscent of Op Art, where color and light generate elusive perceptions of spatial fluctuation and quasi-illusion. Regarding the phenomenological instability of sight, Maurice Merleau‑Ponty incisively observes: “With a single movement, I close off the landscape and open up the object. The two operations do not coincide accidentally: the contingencies of my bodily organization, such as the structures of my retina, are not what necessitates my seeing when the surroundings are blurred if I wish to see the object in focus.”[3] In Pfahler’s work, this sensory condition manifests a dynamic interplay between color, light, and perception: his canvases do not simply rest in static geometrical structure but reveal a momentary materialization of color, where latent forms and shifting perceptual conditions converge. As such, Pfahler’s colors seem to take shape only in the act of seeing, shifting as the viewer moves nearer or farther from the canvas, producing a quixotically fleeting perceptual experience. This gives color a quasi-bodily resonance, heightening optical and experiential engagement. Unlike Mondrian at the height of his abstraction, maintaining a visual syntax thoroughly anchored to the flat whiteness of the ground, Pfahler’s logic allows a given ground to emerge in a perceptual flux, where figure and field are dynamically interwoven.
 

Georg Karl Pfahler, Doppel Zwei, 1966. Acrylic on canvas, 63 3/8 by 134 3/4 inches. Photo: Elisabeth Bernstein. Courtesy of the estate of the artist and Nino Mier Gallery.

The broadest work in the exhibition, Doppel Zwei (1966), unfolds horizontally across four panels of alternating circular leitmotifs and vertical bands, its scale and chromatic intensity commanding the viewer’s attention and shaping an experience that is both formal and perceptually immersive. According to the exhibition’s press release, these forms have been linked to the Kennedy assassination; the work itself, however, operates less as a commemorative object than as a dynamic engagement with abstraction’s capacity to modulate perception. The diagonals and circular motifs, rather than conveying literal or symbolic content, generate an optical and spatial resonance that situates the viewer within a fluctuating field of color and form. Emerging from a post-war European context shaped in part by the Marshall Plan (the German Wirtschaftswunder or Economic Miracle), Pfahler’s work reflects an instance of European engagement with American post-war abstraction: it commands attention through scale, chromatic vibrancy, and structural tenet, transforming historical conditions into a visual revelry—embodied, immediate, and lively. The tension between a potential historical reading and perceptual immediacy underscores Pfahler’s engagement with the work’s illusive dissolution of the line of contact between green and blue, where historical resonances take on the value of a secondary, refracted layer.

Installation view of "Georg Karl Pfahler: NEW YORK | NEW YORK" at Nino Mier Gallery, SoHo, New York. Photo: Elisabeth Bernstein. Courtesy of the estate of the artist and Nino Mier Gallery. 

This exhibition demonstrates Pfahler’s full commitment to a method of abstraction—reiterated through permutations in color, scale, and composition. That method is repeatedly interrogated, stretched, and at moments imploded from within, yielding a visual experience that is at once exacting, vibrant, and phenomenologically arresting. While the main gallery space is dominated by commanding canvases, two works on paper there and several smaller studies in the adjacent gallery provide further glimpses into Pfahler’s process. These works reveal the continuous hand of the artist at work across scales and mediums, often perceptually transforming the canvases’ framework into forms that ripple with organic curvature. The exhibition’s radiant reds, deep blues, and vibrant violets might even recall the nostalgic harmonies of “California Dreamin’” by The Mamas and the Papas, whose buoyant melodies mirror the optimistic, forward-looking energy of postwar America. Against the backdrop of Germany's Wirtschaftswunder and the global projection of the United States’ cultural and economic power, Pfahler translates that transatlantic ethos into a visual register poised at the threshold of the collective unconscious: a chromatic field where historical circumstance, formalist citation, and perceptual experience coalesce, allowing abstraction to absorb, reflect, and implicitly critique the era’s repeatedly fractured rhetoric of exuberance and promise. The paintings of Georg Karl Pfahler remain antithetical to the visceral intensity, if not symptomatic discordance, of Aerosmith and Black Sabbath. But, in its very inherent unsteadiness, a given hard edge in his paintings, operating on its own terms of graphic musicality, transfigures the beholder’s gestalt through all of its sheer opticality of coloration, unfolding across temporal and spatial horizons. WM
 

Georg Karl Pfahler, Touro VII a, 1966-68. Mixed media on canvas, 55 3/8 by 53 3/8 inches. Photo: Elisabeth Bernstein. Courtesy of the estate of the artist and Nino Mier Gallery.

 
Notes
1. Ogden Nicholas Rood, Modern Chromatics, with Applications to Art and Industry (New York: D. Appleton, 1879), p. 241. See also Jacqueline Lichtenstein, “Modern Color: A New Paradigm,” in Painting beyond Itself: The Medium in the Post-medium Condition, eds. Isabelle Graw and Ewa Lajer-Burcharth (Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2016), pp. 63–76, here p. 76.
2. Alfred H. Barr, Jr. Matisse: His Art and His Public (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1951), p. 198.
3. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Phenomenology of Perception, trans. Donald A. Landes (London and New York: Routledge, 2012), p. 70.

Georg Karl Pfahler: New York | New York
Nino Mier Gallery, SoHo
November 14 – December 16, 2025