A large and striking mid-century oil on canvas by German artist Heinz Sauerland.
Titled Figurengruppe (Group of Figures) and dated 1965, the painting depicts a tightly arranged group of figures, reduced almost to abstraction through broad, expressive brushwork and a strong palette of blue, green, black and red.
A particularly good example of Sauerland's mid-1960s work, where the human figure is broken down into simplified, almost mask-like forms.
Heinz Sauerland (1936–2023)
Heinz Sauerland was a German painter and printmaker associated with Bochum and the post-war art scene of the Ruhr. Born in 1936, he worked across painting, drawing and printmaking, producing both figurative and abstract work over a career spanning several decades.
Contemporary records place Sauerland exhibiting as a Bochum artist by 1964, while surviving works from the period show him experimenting with increasingly abstracted forms and expressive colour.
Sauerland was a member of the Bochumer Künstlerbund (Bochum Artists' Association), with which he exhibited and produced graphic work. A 1971 colour lithograph was published by the Bochumer Künstlerbund in conjunction with the city's Kulturamt, and his association with the group continued over many years. In 2013 his work was included alongside Robert Imhof and Artur Cremer-Acre in a Bochumer Künstlerbund exhibition at Galerie 13 in Bochum.
His work ranges from strongly gestural abstraction to highly simplified figurative compositions, often characterised by vigorous brushwork, emphatic outlines and bold areas of colour. Sauerland also worked extensively in printmaking; surviving colour linocuts and lithographs from the late 1960s and 1970s demonstrate the same movement between abstraction and the human figure seen in his paintings.
Sauerland remained connected to the wider Westphalian art community later in his career. In 1995 he was included in an exhibition of the Berufsverband Bildender Künstler Westfalen alongside artists including Artur Cremer-Acre, Hermann Metzger and Theo Uhlmann.
Heinz Sauerland died in January 2023, aged 86.
