Das Telefon, 1966

About the Work

Consisting of two canvasses, Das Telefon bursts the borders of the customary pictorial format. The scene most likely depicts a violent crime. Two men – one standing, the other lying on the ground and entreating – are sprayed with blood. The large-format rug- and wall-patterns are typical for the artist’s works from the mid-1960s onwards. Lausen repeatedly links the motif of the bourgeois living-room idyll with unfathomable acts of violence: in his eyes, commensurate with the ambiguity of his contemporary society in postwar Germany oscillating between economic miracle and repressed National Socialist past.