Fred Thieler was one of the most important representatives of German Abstract Expressionism.
His works are based on a pictorial strategy of controlled contingency. A dialogue with the
colours played a key role in this strategy. After initial experience with representational painting,
Thieler devoted himself exclusively to the development of abstract colour worlds in the 1950s.

During the 1960s Fred Thieler began to work on the picture carrier while it was lying on the ground.
The paints were splashed on using watering cans and buckets and spread by chance, albeit also with
some control gained by folding, bending and lifting the picture carrier. He supplemented and
extended this experimental handling of free-flowing paint by using collage and décollage processes.
This technique, seen here in the work Hommage à Tiepolo, involved sticking scraps of paper into the work
(collage) and then removing some parts (décollage) in order to fill the empty spaces with paint once more.