"Zweifigurig II", 1964

With his "Kopffüßler" (Cephalopod), created in 1961, Horst Antes responded to the abstract styles of Informel at the beginning of the 1960s and established a new figurative direction in painting. The gnome figure inspired by Expressionism, Cubism and Primitive Art - consisting of a head, a pair of eyes, arms and legs - became the sole subject and motif of his paintings. Developed entirely from colour, the figure does not want to be understood as an abstracted embodiment of man, but as an artistic figure reduced to a sign or - as the collector Wolf Hermann has described it - as a "freely invented and changeable hieroglyph for the experience of human form."