Winfred Gaul dedicated his artistic work to the exploration of a pictorial genre: painting. For him, it was - as he himself put it - "a traditional medium with a limited radius of possibilities." But instead of transgressing the medial boundaries in the sense of (post-)modernism, Gaul accepted the peculiarities of painting and stated: "Within these boundaries, however, I know no taboo." Thus, a sure sense of media coupled with an enormous joy in experimentation permeate Gaul's œuvre. In a process of constantly exploring the pictorial means - color and form - as well as the creative possibilities and their limits, the artist opens up a wide variety of pictorial forms, examines them consistently, and ultimately moves on to a new subject.
Gaul's artistic roots lie in the 1950s, in Informel. In the scriptural "Poèmes Visibles", color manuscripts, wipe pictures and "white pictures" Gaul, quite an "associative systematist", outlines the field of tension of surface, form, color and spatial effect. This predominantly impulsive-gestural phase was replaced at the beginning of the 1960s by the color-intensive and form-reduced "Traffic Signs & Signals". Starting with collages inspired by Pop Art, Gaul increasingly turned to the abstract-aesthetic effect of the traffic signs that characterize everyday life. An independent system of signs emerges that refuses any interpretation of content. Since the 1970s, Gaul has increasingly begun to analytically dissect the picture surface - paying less attention to the color-form effect - and to split up geometric forms, thus laying the foundations for so-called signal painting in Germany. His series "Markierungen" (Markings) and "Recycling" (Recycling) ultimately lead into the 1980s, in which his artistic interest is above all in multi-part paintings and pictures without right angles.