The paintings of Klaus Friedeberger, who has died aged 97, were forged in the dry heat of central Australia during the second world war and fostered in 1950s London, where he began a lifelong inquiry into abstract painting.
Whereas many abstract painters of the 60s were working on a large scale with fields of unmodulated colour that emphasised the flatness of the surface of the painting, Friedeberger eventually eschewed colour altogether. Working unfashionably on an easel, he made small, modest monochromatic paintings of abstracted forms that advanced, receded or hovered in space within the confines of a square canvas, never quite abandoning the illusion of pictorial space.
In Light Spatial (1992), grey forms and a white trapezoidal “window” shape creates a luminous, back-lit space within which a sweeping diagonal of light-grey appears to hover weightlessly in mid-air. In Black Space 21 (2014), there is a theatrical, even balletic quality to the painted forms that seem to embrace – or collide – in mid-air. “My paintings have not been ‘about’ something outside themselves,” he wrote. “I want them to have a presence with a convincing reality of their own.”
However, Friedeberger’s explorations had begun firmly in the real world. In 1946, while still in Australia, he had begun working, in a high-pitched palette of bright colours, on a series of paintings of children at play. It was a subject that would occupy him for the next 20 or so years: the blocky, abstracted brush marks and aggressively vivid colours of these canvases proved a perfect medium for the rough and tumble of children’s play.
When they were shown at his first-one man exhibition at Annely Juda’s newly opened Hamilton Gallery in London in 1963, the art critic Charles Spencer wrote: “The world of children – serious, cruel, aggressive, self-centred – is to him not only a reflection of life itself, but, because of its uninhibitedness, a truer insight into human behaviour.”
Yet, as Spencer went on to point out, painting was, to Friedeberger, “not a bald statement on the human situation” but an end in itself. In Child Playing With a Carton (1960), a cardboard box worn like a Ned Kelly helmet covers the child’s eyes as it gropes its way forward. Take away the fingers and suggestion of a face, and the work is a completely abstract composition in saturated hues of red, orange and blue.
Fighting Children (White), which he produced in 1966, is a transitional painting that still retains the vestiges of human form in a head and arms, one thrusting, the other defending, at the centre of the composition. But it was not long before Friedeberger became completely absorbed in making paintings about light and space. The subject matter had only ever been something to get a picture started.
Now he occasionally turned to reproductions of Old Master paintings, often pinned upside-down on his studio wall, to spark a compositional idea. Working with that idea, Friedeberger would endlessly paint, sand down and repaint. In this regard he had much in common with his compatriots Lucian Freud and Frank Auerbach, who shared this “hard-won image” approach to painting.
Born into a secular Jewish family in Berlin, Klaus was sent away in 1938 to Eerde Quaker school in the Netherlands. The following year he arrived in Britain as a refugee and not long afterwards was arrested as an enemy alien as war broke out. He was eventually transported to Australia aboard the troopship Dunera. On board were around 2,500 refugees comprising German and Austrian Jewish refugees, as well as Italians and a number of German prisoners of war.
On disembarkation at Sydney in 1940, the 18-year-old Friedeberger was transferred to an internment camp at Hay in western New South Wales, and the place became an informal academy for him. His fellow internees Ernst Kitzinger and Franz Philipp lectured on the history of art and former Bauhaus tutor Ludwig Hirschfeld Mack gave classes on colour theory, while other artists were on hand to share their wisdom, including Heinz Henghes, the sculptor, and Hein Heckroth, who went on to win an Oscar as art director of the film The Red Shoes. With their encouragement, Friedeberger made watercolours, designed posters and took part in a camp exhibition held in 1941.
He was released from the camp the following year, and joined an army labour unit. There he met the Australian artists Arthur Boyd and Sidney Nolan, and exhibited with the pair at Contemporary Art Society exhibitions in Melbourne and Sydney.
After demobilisation he was able to study art under the Commonwealth Reconstruction Training Scheme, and in 1947 he enrolled at East Sydney Technical College (now the National Art School). Following his fine art studies, he won a prize that enabled him to sail for Europe the following year. He never returned. The first exhibition of the Australian Artists’ Association was held in 1953 and Friedeberger designed the poster. During this period, he was living in Wimbledon, south-west London, working on his paintings of children at play.
He eventually moved across London to a top-lit studio in Chelsea. On a trip to Florence in 1960 he met the New Yorker Julie Klorman in the Brancacci Chapel when he lent her his binoculars to see the frescoes better. Two years later they were married.
Despite being included in various group shows, Friedeberger’s single-minded investigation into picture-making meant that, by the close of the 60s he had almost stopped exhibiting, supporting himself instead by working in advertising and graphic design, while also teaching at the Central School and the London College of Printing.
Critical fortune began to change in 1986 when a selection of his new works was shown at the Warwick Arts Trust. In 1992 a retrospective was held at Woodlands Art Gallery in Blackheath, south London, followed by an exhibition of early work at England & Co gallery in Notting Hill (2008).
A selection of his recent work, curated by me, was shown at the School of Art Galleries in Aberystwyth (2009), with Friedeberger showing paintings that combined accents of metallic paint in conjunction with the usual black and white.
When asked why he had renounced colour, Friedeberger said he felt he had done all he could with it. However, in his last exhibition at Delahunty Fine Art gallery in Mayfair in 2016, he had begun to reintroduce vivid flashes of blue and red in some of the Black Space paintings. The critic Andrew Lambirth saw in them “a spirit of celebration – of the glories of looking and the splendours of paint”.
Friedeberger is survived by Julie.
• Klaus Friedeberger, artist and designer, born 23 August 1922; died 19 September 2019
