Im Wald und auf der Heide: Silence

Silence is one of a series of six individually coloured and printed linocuts titled Im Wald und auf der Heide ('In the Forest and on the Heath'). Similarly monumental and also inverted as the Faustkämpfer of 1977 (see previous lot), the prints depict, at times barely discernible, a horse and rider amongst trees. Although one of the plates, Ich zeige Karl May explicitly - and amusingly - refers to the German author Karl May, whose tales of an American West he had never seen have gripped the imagination of generations of German boys, the figure of a rider in a forest has much wider connotations. This is particularly true in a German cultural context. The figure of a rider in a wild and lonely place is the quintessential image of the dark, uncanny side of German romanticism, from Theodor Storm's Schimmelreiter to Goethe's Erlkönig and ultimately of course Albrecht Dürer's Knight, Death and the Devil.