Coming to New York in February 2020, I walked into the Manhattan branch of Lisson Gallery and the utterly conceptual, Ed-Ruscha-like series Doors: over 3,000 small black and white photographs of, well, doors. Just as Ed Ruscha had in 1966 with his camera captured Every Building on the Sunset Strip, so had the photographer – in a very European manner by foot and not, like Ruscha, by car – walked around New York City and photographed every door he had come past. The artist’s name was Roy Colmer, and he had, as I learned from the press release, studied at HFBK Hamburg.
The encounter with Colmer’s work and the discovery of his being a HFBK Hamburg alumnus was one of the inspiring moments behind TIAA. Who else might be out there? In another Manhattan-based dealer gallery, in the cultural center of a small community, in a studio at their home? And who had given up their artistic practice altogether, because life as an artist was for whatever reason not an option? Researching Roy Colmer was no challenge, his estate is represented by a major gallery, so information on his work is quite abundant.
Interestingly enough, it seems that Colmer (London 1935 – Los Angeles 2014) is something like the male equivalent of an “older woman artist,” at least when it comes to his painting practice. Between 1960 and 1965, he studied in the painting department with professors Georg Gresko, Willem Grimm, Hans Thiemann, and Richard von Sichowsky, professor for typography. Colmer moved to New York in 1967; already in the same year, he was featured in the Collector’s Critic’s & Curator’s Choice group show at Sachs Gallery, New York. In Hamburg, he had debuted in 1965 with a solo show at Gunter Beckman Gallery.
He would have presented canvases, as his works from the early 1970s demonstrate that he had found his tool, the spray gun, and his visual language, abstract painting in, literally, vibrant colors: his works from that time come with a lozenge-like shape as their center or with several amorphous forms that move over the picture plane. An overlying regularly striped pattern structures the paintings horizontally; they look like, for those of us who have been there, flickering TV screens, with their colors somewhat amplified towards the psychedelic spectrum. Colmer thus counts among those artists who, in the 1960s and 1970s, with their paint brushes worked on the images produced by television, just as, for instance, Karl Otto Götz had done with his raster paintings.
But while Götz dipped even deeper into painting, Colmer in the early 1970s dropped the spray gun and took to the (video) camera. Thanks to a review by Raphael Rubinstein praising the internationally traveling exhibition High Times, Hard Times: New York Painting 1967-1975, we have a detailed description of one Colmer’s videos: “[…], we hear Pharaoh Sander's great jazz anthem (with vocals by Leon Thomas) ‘The Creator Has a Master Plan’ as pulsing blobs of white slowly meld, split and move from side to side. The wow and flutter of the soundtrack echoes the feedback-induced action on screen.” According to Rubinstein’s essay, Colmer presented altogether two video works and one spray-gun painting. Katy Siegel’s celebrated 2006-08 show featured “many artists not included in the current canon and, indeed, examines a moment that has been largely passed over by museums, scholars and the current crop of collectors.” Colmer’s obviously wasn’t a household name in this context and those years either; his paintings had been rediscovered only in 2004 when exhibited at Mitchell Algus Galley in New York. Algus had met Colmer in the mid-1990s via the artist Hans Breder. Algus had also introduced Colmer’s work to David Reed who had acted as curatorial adviser to the High Times, Hard Times exhibition.
Colmer’s fame had been that of a photographer’s. Works from the 1980s, for instance, made it into the collection of the Museum of Modern Art, New York, samples of black-and-white street photography, pictures of pedestrians, sometimes in low-angle-shot, unaware and oblivious of the camera. His photographic œuvre from the 1970s, including Doors, however, looks like textbook conceptualism. Hanne Darboven’s serial approach springs to mind, and the affinity isn’t just a formal one. Colmer and Darboven had studied and exhibited together at New York’s Art and Project Gallery in 1976. It was a lasting bond that involved repeated artistic encounters. In 2001, for instance, Colmer participated in the tribute show Für Hanne at Ascan Crone Gallery, Hamburg, next to Carl Andre, Sol LeWitt, and Lawrence Weiner.
This article was published in February 2025.
