Die Fahne Hoch!

The Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, the USA.

Enamel on canvas.

The composition of the work consists of simple symmetrical patterns on a black background, converging to the center of the picture in the form of a cross. The human eye perceives the image as white stripes on a black background, although the artist applied black paint to the canvas, and the white parts are just unpainted fragments of the canvas. The same distance between the stripes makes the image flat: the author deliberately avoided creating volume and depth. The title of the work from the series “Black Pictures”, taken from the Nazi anthem “Songs of Horst Wesel”, makes the viewer think about Nazism and its consequences. However, the artist himself claimed that the work does not carry any semantic load and is what the viewer sees on the canvas directly in front of him.