July (1982) is a large oil and wood-on-canvas painting by Rainer Fetting, one of the most visible works of the Junge Wilden generation. Exhibited at the Fred Hoffman Gallery, Los Angeles, in 1982. Gifted by the artist to the gallery owner in trust, the painting was later sold at Christie’s in 1985 as Fetting’s European market contracted and he relocated to New York.
Close looking
The canvas is monumental — 255 cm high by 300 cm wide — and the subject is domestic: a half-open window or terrace door opening onto a late-summer landscape, presumably in Berlin or the surrounding countryside. The scale is architectural rather than bodily; the viewer is positioned inside, looking out, and the painting’s width stretches the gaze horizontally across a field of greens, ochres, and high-key blues that read as July heat.
The brushwork is rapid and unblended, the signature Junge Wilden combination of Cézanne-esque structural patches and New Wave immediacy. Fetting uses wood fragments embedded in or attached to the canvas, creating a relief surface that catches light and casts tiny shadows — a material argument that the painting is not a window but a wall with a hole in it. The composition is split between interior darkness (left) and exterior brightness (right), a diagonal division that recalls Matisse’s open windows but replaces Matisse’s decorative flatness with Neo-Expressionist impasto urgency.
What reads first is the temperature — the painting feels hot. The palette is saturated in the exterior passages, muted and gray-green in the interior. This is not the cool, analytical color of a Bonnard interior; it is the sticky, humid color of a Berlin summer before air conditioning. The gesture is confident, almost casual — Fetting was at the height of his market and technical skill in 1982, and the painting carries that assurance without tipping into the bombast that would later attract criticism.
Critical reception
July is representative of Fetting’s most commercially successful period. The window motif — interior/exterior, private/public, looking out from a confined space — resonates with the West Berlin condition (the Wall, the enclave, the looking-outward stance), though Fetting rarely made this connection explicit. Critics have read the painting as both a formal exercise in color-field landscape and a coded allegory of West Berlin’s geopolitical claustrophobia.
See also
- Rainer Fetting — the artist
- Junge Wilden — the movement
- Café Deutschland — Immendorff’s allegorical interior