After the Second World War, some artists, marked by the experience of war and tyranny, want to make a new start and begin to elevate color to the sole subject of the picture. The innovation: not the form or the figure, a symbol or an action determine the picture, but the color alone, largely detached from any serving task. Artists begin to investigate the intrinsic effect and function of color in terms of light, space, surface, form, matter, time and movement. Color is stripped of its cloak of illusionary and representational function. Instead, artists celebrate the sound evoked by it, the psychic energy of color as the focus of sensory experience.
Bernd Berner's "Flächenräume" are poetically charged color spaces that actively challenge the viewer, drawing him into the picture and simultaneously projecting their spatiality onto him through the radiant power of the color substance.