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Rolf Cavael

Rolf Cavael’s lithographs from his later career are emblematic of an artist whose goal to explore non-objectivity was hampered - and shaped - by an era of political and social strife. Cavael was born in Prussia and attended high school in France, but ultimately settled in Berlin in the early 1920s to be near the burgeoning avant-garde art scene. Though he was successful as both an artist and a teacher, it was a short-lived prosperity as by the early 1930s the German government had labelled most experimental artists “degenerate.” Cavael was banned from exhibiting; when he did so anyhow, he was sent to the Dachau concentration camp. He survived, and once the war ended he resumed his path toward Abstraction. By the 1950s his work was almost entirely non-representational.

Cavel’s exploration of this style was, for the time, still radical, as the rules of Abstraction, Abstract-Expressionism, and other contemporary genres still favored a particular style. As artists across the world sought new forms of expression that drew clear delineations between pre- and post-war society, Cavael’s work would evolve to embrace the era of loose, non-geometric exploration of the matrix, seeking transformation in joyful abandon, color saturation, and movement.