walter dexel's late work did not develop from a continuous working process, but emerged after a thirty-year hiatus in the painter's career. in 1930, dexel painted the last picture of his early phase. until 1933, he produced a series of gouaches entitled “heads.” after that, during the nazi regime, dexel fell silent and was forced to remain silent. he was one of the “degenerate artists,” which today is an honorary title, but at the time was linked to the essential question of survival for artists. during this period, dexel explored a new area of art history and made a name for himself with important art history books.

it was not until long after the second world war – thanks to the sturm exhibition on the circle around herwarth walden shown at the berlin nationalgalerie in 1961 – that dexel received the decisive impetus to take up painting again. many of his friends – especially the hamburg art collector siegfried poppe – influenced this decision.

after his new beginning, the now 70-year-old dexel initially painted based on early sketches. this is a legitimate method after such a long hiatus. the “late dexel” then began in the mid-1960s. there are certainly further connections to the works of the 1920s. the late “hakenbilder” undoubtedly tie in with the diagonal compositions from 1924 to 1930. the series of paintings developed in 1968, entitled “serie xxvii,” also has historical roots: it is explicitly based—hence the title—on a painting from 1927, which now has numerous new variations. the works in “serie xxvii” represent a particularly successful phase in dexel's work.

dexel's new pictorial ideas also give rise to new formal solutions, which show that, while dexel increasingly questions certain pictorial conventions, he never disregards the principle that composition means a planned order of forms from which nothing can be taken away and to which nothing can be added. when dexel, for example, considers new ways of overcoming the traditional four-part picture format, he always does so while adhering to the principle that the pictorial forms must not lose their fixed relationship to their boundaries.

how this apparent contradiction is to be understood can be illustrated above all by the “bandwerkbilder” (sheets 1 and 2), most of which date from 1965. when werner hofmann, in his monograph on dexel published in 1972, refers to the meanders of these works as “a phased excerpt of an endlessly recurring formal movement,” it should be added that this excerpt is not arbitrary or chosen at random. the outstanding significance of dexel's “bandwerkbilder” lies in their mastery of ambivalent pictorial concepts: on the one hand, their forms extend beyond the visible image area, seeming to emerge from a zone outside the frame and also striving to escape from the picture; on the other hand, however, these meanders are firmly and immovably bound to the picture. the choice of section is one of the artist's decisions and cannot be corrected without the composition losing its balance.

similar to the “bandwerkbilder,” the work “vier in grau” [four in gray] (sheet 5), created in 1970, can be similarly classified. the number '4', in its abstract basic structure, is used to create a sequence of forms that seem to come from somewhere and lead somewhere. however, as much as this movement of forms seems to ignore the boundaries of the picture, it would be impossible to arbitrarily change the framed area.

comparable observations can be made in dexel's “hakenbilder,” for example in “scheibe im quadrat und haken” [disc in a square and hook] from 1970 (sheet 4), where dexel has linked the hook motif and the disc-in-a-square motif. it cannot be overlooked that the white hook reveals tendencies to break up the image. however, this form, which penetrates like a wedge from the outside, is tamed by a compositional system that is concentrically oriented in two ways with the help of a square and a circle and is able to integrate the hook into the unity of the pictoral composition.

the series “scheibe im quadrat” [disc in a square] from 1969, also reveals that dexel's late works are becoming increasingly systematic. however, the systematic nature of these images is not dominated by an absolutely understood mathematical determinism, but always leaves room for freely developed pictorial ideas. the works in the series “scheibe im quadrat” [disc in a square] are often pushed to the point of symmetrical division into two or even four parts, but then the artist withdraws them from further rigid systematization by, for example, designing one quarter of the picture differently from the other three quarters. standardized elements also appear in dexel's late work, such as in “komposition mit zwei weißen senkrechten” [composition with two white verticals] from 1968 (sheet 3), but they too are arranged in the pictoral composition according to the artist's independent decision.

dexel has always granted great importance to such freedom in the application and arrangement of pictorial means – then as now. as early as the 1920s, he rejected the narrow canon of the stijl artists and opted for an “open, modulatable constructivism” (hofmann). this independence also characterizes his late work.