Friedrich Zettl’s abstract surrealist paintings allow figures and settings to emerge from gestural brushwork. Dark forms hover within blue fields, broad strokes suggest unfamiliar creatures, and passages of light open into spaces that resist a stable reading.
Selected Abstract Surrealist Paintings
Earlier Abstract Surrealism Works
About Abstract and Gestural Surrealism
Here, “gestural surrealism” describes a meeting of expressive brush movement and ambiguous imagery in Zettl’s work. A stroke can read as a body, a cliff or a shadow without settling into one identity. The term serves as a way into this selection rather than a claim to a separate historical movement.
In Scene at the Waters, a dark central mass is suspended between blue and ochre passages. Morning Meditation compresses dark shapes around a luminous blue opening. The spaces remain painterly, even where they suggest a landscape.
Figures and Imagined Spaces
Other works are closer to isolated creatures. Broad black, green and brown strokes gather into compact presences against white paper. Their uncertain anatomy leaves room for the eye to move between an imagined figure and the marks that produce it.
The final horizontal works return to landscape: dark terrain-like bands, pale sweeps and areas of colour create depth without describing a specific place. See New Surrealism Concepts for the later development of these shifting spaces.
Related articles: New Surrealism Concepts | Gestural Landscape | Abstract Dragon Paintings
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Available Artworks
Original works are available on FriedrichZettl.com and Saatchi Art