Ernst Wilhelm Nay painted this light-flooded “Sonnenzirkel” (“Solar Circle”) directly before he created his famous “Freiburger Bild.” In the early summer of 1956, the University of Freiburg invited Nay to realize a mural for the vestibule of the newly built Institute of Chemistry, the so-called “Freiburger Bild” (cat. rais. no. 812, ill.). The space available for the mural was the rear wall of the spacious yet relatively low entrance hall, which measured 255 x 655 cm. Nay accepted the commission without imposing any conditions and decided on a canvas painting on a stretcher covering the whole wall. “The difficulty that a commission entails lies in the fact that the artist must pay attention to the effect of his painting and adapt it to the circumstances,” Nay concluded on June 29, 1956 (Ernst Wilhelm Nay, Lesebuch, Cologne 2002, p. 140)
Over the course of a year, it was important to him to approach this huge and elongated surface up close in order to grasp the space and unusual proportions of such a massive white field. To avoid any risk of enlarging a draft sketch, Nay dispensed with all sketches and preliminary work that would have led directly to his largest picture of all. However, he was not able to fully avoid his usual creative routine, and so he completed around 16 watercolor studies of proportional sizes, mostly 27 x 57 cm, as well as three paintings in sizes of 80/85 x 200 cm: “Mänaden “ (cat. rais. 809, ill.), “Sonnenweg” (cat. rais. 810, ill.) and the present “Sonnenzirkel” (cat. rais. 811) in order to approach the enormous expanse of the front wall of the entrance hall in exemplary fashion. These three elongated oblong paintings prove to be unusual not only because of their format, their density is also unique in the artist's work.

"The idea for my disks was initially entirely artistic. If the composer is a writer of music, I wanted to be a writer of color, using the means of color in conjunction with rhythm, quantum, dynamics, and rows to form a surface,” said Nay in response to the question of how he came up with the disk, ‘for him the natural spread of a color is the process of painting the circles.’ (Quoted from: ex. cat. Ernst Wilhelm Nay, Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam April 30 - June 10, 1998, et al., p. 99). This epiphany helped him ingeniously simplify the art he had been striving for. Suddenly, as a pure vehicle of sound, color was the bearer of expression, liberated from figure and form.

In this way, Nay avoids an additive juxtaposition of individual formal and rhythmic centers in the painting “Sonnenzirkel,” as would be suggested by the frieze-like format, which the artist wanted to avoid. The result is a subtly conceived composition akin to a melody in which emphasis, retraction, and the balancing of equilibrium are naturally lost in the eye. Hence, the powerful yellow and modified orange tones on the dominant red convey the brilliant idea of a moving rhythm that transforms the cosmos of the surface into a self-contained choreography of pictorial forces while, at the same time, establishing a connection to a more universal rhythmic field that is incident from the outside and radiates back outwards again.
Gestural forms and glowing, circular disks proliferate across the pictorial surface, taking on a lyrical yet rhythmic form and reflecting the artist's vibrant mood. Dots and circles of different sizes densely painted in lemon yellow, orange, cadmium red, and a little violet, followed by gray and black dots, bring the composition to life. The colors are applied vividly and significantly, and the circular forms are painted to create a musical aesthetic. The artist stages a seemingly weightless pictorial scene that “is virtually bubbling over with joie de vivre, rhythm, chromatic splendor, quick brushstrokes, and energetic movement,” according to the art historian and Nay expert Siegfried Gohr (quoted from Ernst Wilhelm Nay – Ein Essay, in ex. cat. Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, 1998, p. 27).

If you imagine this energetic composition on the massive wall in the foyer of the Chemistry Institute, the radiant energy it contains will transform this bare white wall into an exciting and appealing surface. The viewer cannot escape this energetic and pleasantly cozy radiance, even in private: “Sonnenzirkel” reveals itself as a mystical source of light that mysteriously warms its surroundings. With “Sonnenzirkel,” the artist confirmed his position as the leading German colorist of the 20th century, creating a precious and dense design for this painting and meticulously pondering its chromatic effects:It is the rhythmic sequences of the use of color and the moving rhythms of the surface structure that carry the element of dynamism in this disk painting: a realization through the potential volume of the disks in their aggregation, as well as increased diffusion and sometimes defined by the arrangement of black disks. It is always fascinating to see how Ernst Wilhelm Nay succeeds in expressing his distinct empathy for color and form with such airy lightness. [MvL]