Untitled, n.d.

Untitled, n.d.; Paint and mixed media on canvas; 72 × 52.3 × 3 cm

Part of a large series of paintings begun in the early 1980s, and in some cases completed in the early 1990s, these paintings explore themes intrinsically linked to the motif of the cross (as an intersection between life and death but also as an interruption of a line of continuity), the barrier or border (thus questioning the division imposed by the wall), and dissolve into abstract details of scratches and graffiti that seem to mimic spontaneous gestures on that very same surface of the separating wall.

(…) At the bottom of Untitled (undated), a lower section of intensively applied paint, whites and yellows over a muddy green field with hints of cobalt blue, offsets a grey-green section that looms above, its virtually uniform tone only relieved by the textured motif of the cross. Dividing these sections is an undulating band of evenly applied black paint, almost without any traces of brushwork in comparison to the two other sections. Suggestive of splits and gaps as much as barriers and borders, it offers a coded sign of the Berlin Wall, which ran only 2.2 kilometers away from his studio in Mendelstraße in Pankow. Where other painters including Stefan Plenkers and Roland Nicolaus offered blunt depictions of the Wall, Rehfeldt’s makes a subtler, pictorial point. If the composition is somewhat capricious, that is part of the point: indiscriminate division of the painterly plane, in the sense that it lacks a clear structural or material reason for the particular pictorial breaks, suggests the arbitrariness of other divisions running through the city.
(Inter Alios, Inter Alia: Robert Rehfeldt Between Mail Art and Painting – Christopher Williams-Wynn).