Raimund Girke, born in 1930 in Heinzendorf/Niederschlesien is one of the groundbreaking artists of German post-war art and is, among others, held to be a forerunner of Analytic Painting. Between 1951 and 1952 he studies at the Werkkunstschule in Hannover, between 1952 and 1956 he continues his studies at the Staatlichen Kunstakademie in Dusseldorf. In 1959 he is awarded with the  Price of the city of Wolfsburg for painting. In 1961/62 Girke develops the monochrome white painting. In 1962  he receives the Kunstpreis der Jugend, Stuttgart. Between 1966 and 1971 he teaches at the Werkkunstschule Hannover, from 1971 to 1996 Girke holds a professorship for free painting at the Hochschule der Künste Berlin. In 1995 he receives the Lovis-Corinth-Price of the  Künstlergilde Esslingen and in 2002 the Art price of Lower Saxony.  He made it his vocation to find a specific and classical order in the limitless and complex world of the colour white, thereby avoiding any hierarchical constraints, which might provoke an imbalance of colours. Thus, he reduced the colours in his pictures to white, accompanied only by shades of blue and brown, and tried to arrange the colours using a structure of rows. Leaving out the step of traditional composite painting, he dedicated himself from 1950 to the conscious examination of the ‘informel’, in an attempt to surpass this tendency. He made use of creative devices such as structure, monochromy, repetition, movement and reduction, and these elements may be found throughout his oeuvre from the mid 50s onwards. In surmounting the ‘informel’ through precisely said devices, his approach overlaps significantly with the thought construct and artistic repertoire of the ZERO group. Raimund Girke dies in 2002 in Cologne.